artificial intelligenceWatch out human game designers, your days may be numbered!

An artificial intelligence named Scheherazade, created by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed choose-your-own-adventure games that test nearly equal to those developed by a human.

At this point, human authored interactive narrative still remains the most cost-effective means of generating an interactive narrative experience. However, open interactive narrative shows promise in reducing authorial burden in the near future. Scheherazade-IF and the lessons we learned in creating and evaluating it serve as a first step in creating human-quality interactive narrative with almost no human authoring required.

This was among the conclusions reached after a study [PDF] that had the AI produce interactive fiction for two scenarios, one involving a bank robbery and the other a date to a movie.

In fact, this is not the first time a programmed system has authored a game scenario. What allowed these results to test so well, however, was a crowdsourcing approach adopted by the researchers. Alternate stories for the way each scenario might unfold were collected through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. From the language of those stories the AI assembled the branching narratives.

[via CNET]