Turing Lecture with Light Rain, followed by PS3 with Heavy Rain

I went to the IET/BCS lecture down in london on thursday it was by Professor Christopher Bishop, chief research scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge. It was titled "Embracing Uncertainty: The New Machine Intelligence". It was at the IET HQ down in savoy place in london a very nice building on the Thames with view of the london eye and big ben next to the savoy hotel. I rushed down there after work in the rain to catch the lecture with my Mum and grandma.

To be honest I think he was over selling the title most of what he talked about was more analysing data sets (admittedly monstrous data sets) not really anything to do with AI at all.

It started off fairly dry stuff baysian inference to encode knowledge about your search space added to graph models of the system using message passing to assess various probabilities and known data and then some technique to sample large data sets (ie cloud scale or planetary scale data sets) then just as I was getting comfy for a doze he pulled out this thing about using it to rank chess scores and from that Xbox lives Trueskill ranking system which uses all those techniques to rank players for match making purposes.

They also used the system to assess environmental and genetic factors on ashma in a massive study to see if using these techniques they could get a better understanding of the causes.

Most of the stuff has been around for donkey's years Baysian theory dates from the 1760's the graph message passing stuff is also fairly old. It's the interpreting the search space stuff that is new. They used to do this using the montecarlo method but it was quite computationally expensive meaning cloud or planetary sized data sets were out of the question but some new techniques came along that made this possible. However the bloke didn't actually talk about the new stuff which kinda annoyed me as it was probably the only new bit of his talk.

He also framed this as machine inteligence but we are more talking expert systems level of machine inteligence in that it is all in the model you build how it produces certainties and the model is human built. As such get the model wrong and it will be very certain about incorrect answers which seems like a fundamental flaw.

Still it was an interesting talk largely skipping over connectionist approaches to machine inteligence and somewhat abusing the title in my opinion but still what do you expect from someone that's sold their soul to microsoft for probably unspeakable amounts of money.

When I got home I fired up Heavy Rain the PS3 exclusive from wacky french developer Quantic Dream.

QD are a odd sort, though refreshingly different in a world where most games are god of war rip offs or halo rip offs. They have done some innovative but ultimately flawed games like Omikron: the nomad soul and Farenhiet/The Indigo Prophesy their big thing is story and emotion.

Heavy rain is essentially an interactive story but not one of those cheesy low resolution video things that came on 212 CD from back when FMV was still a big deal. This is all real time and they've put a lot of effort into making their characters look as real as possible with fancy modeling and extensive motion capture and fancy effects like depth of field. The characters look pretty real there is still that slightly creepy element of it and the levels or chapters often start with one of the characters face covering the entire screen which is a bit odd at times.

The story focuses on the origami killer a nasty individual who kidnaps then kills kids and leaves an origami figure on them I won't go into too much detail as in this game story is king so I wouldn't want to spoil things but in form this is a mystery story about who this killer is and why he does what he does and indeed the hunt to catch him.

The story is formed from several narratives following several different characters that you play at one time or another. Ethan Mars the depressed father, Madison Paige a chronic insomniac who can only sleep in motels, Scott Shellby a private eye, and Norman Jaden the drug addicted rookie FBI agent. The story flips between different characters and locations as each unravels more of the story it is affected by your actions though without a second play through it's hard to say how much.

The interface is 3rd person moving about with a button held and the right stick or release the button and you go to interaction which is a mix of unrushed button matching small motions to pick things up or press buttons open doors etc, or holding down sequences of buttons (occasionally with deliberately painful or difficult combinations to mimic the stress of the situation), the classic repeated button mash, or Quick time events, all these with the occasional sixaxis motion control thrown in. The interface for the most part feels fairly natural
and involving. The gestural and button tapping to do things feels pretty involving. Even the QTE is pretty well done it feels less like a movie you have to pass and more like something you are in control of. Partly this is down to the fact that missing a button now and then doesn't nessecarily lead to "Game over" and indeed failing may just move the story in a different direction. The incorporation of the motion control still feels a little gimicky and with QTE in the heat of the moment can lead to controllers going flying if you are not careful.

All in all it was a pretty involving story once it got going there was the odd misstep and some issues working out where these characters were coming from and what the hell they were up to as they don't really have introductions or lead in so they sort of come out of nowhere with no context. The modifiable storyline is an interesting quirk I wonder if some of my decisions short cutted it a bit as if felt like there was a chunk of explanation missing somewhere towards the end. Still it was an engaging tale and interesting to playthrough trying it another way and making different decisions makes for a longer game. It does give you the option once you have played it through to pick it up at any of the chapters again, making it slightly easier to go in and try a different path from further up.

Overall it feels like a vastly improved more polished version of Farenheit with a much better story. Well worth a go if you have a PS3 something very different from anything you will get anywhere else with great graphic engaging story and QTE you will hate less than anyother time they were used.