Towards the development of believable agents: Adopting neural architectures and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system via playback of human traces

Artificial intelligence (AI) research on video games primarily focused on the imitation of human-like behavior during the past few years. Moreover, to increase the perceived worth of amusement and gratification, there is an enormous rise in the demand for intelligent agents that can imitate human players and video game characters. However, the agents developed using the majority of current approaches are perceived as rather more mechanical, which leads to frustration, and more importantly, failure in engagement. On that account, this study proposes an imitation learning framework to generate human-like behavior for more precise and accurate reproduction. To build a computational model, two learning paradigms are explored, artificial neural networks (ANN) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS). This study utilized several variations of ANN, including feed-forward, recurrent, extreme learning machines, and regressions, to simulate human player behavior. Furthermore, to find the ideal ANFIS, grid partitioning, subtractive clustering, and fuzzy c-means clustering are used for training. The results demonstrate that ANFIS hybrid intelligence systems trained with subtractive clustering are overall best with an average accuracy of 95%, followed by fuzzy c-means with an average accuracy of 87%. Also, the believability of the obtained AI agents is tested using two statistical methods, i.e., the Mann–Whitney U test and the cosine similarity analysis. Both methods validate that the observed behavior has been reproduced with high accuracy.