How This Weird Dreamcast Game Revolutionized A.I.
Seaman was the first of its kind in the sense that you could intelligently interact with the on-screen character.
Saito actually contemplated what it would be like to have a pet who asked you questions like “who was that woman you brought home last night?”
Seaman was that pet, and in this piece, we’re going to delve into some of the more fascinating aspects of the game’s A.I.
The Seaman gets angry when he’s hungry. He knows when the weekend is and tells you to go out — he even has intercourse (?). The game’s depth and wide array of interactions is what made it interesting. Thematically, the conversations with Seaman were all about real-world stuff; he was just one of the guys, despite looking a little different. It was possible to become — dare I say — friendly with Seaman despite him being an entirely different species. Is it a stretch to say that Seaman is an early icon for video game diversity?
The microphone peripheral was the key piece of hardware that made Seaman possible. Both the microphone and the game were simultaneously in development.
...the software would listen for speech, map that speech as closely as possible to a pre-determined library, and then select the most plausible/appropriate response based on a pre-written vocabulary and sentence structure.
See the full story here: https://medium.com/super-jump/how-this-weird-dreamcast-game-revolutionized-a-i-6c0abb9ac083https://medium.com/super-jump/how-this-weird-dreamcast-game-revolutionized-a-i-6c0abb9ac083