Any Counter-Strike player worth his salt knows about PodBot, an add-on that gives the popular multiplayer shooter an dose of AI. If you can’t find anyone to show off your CS prowess to, you can just play with yourself add some bots to a game and play against your computer! Talk about self-fulfillment!

Anyways, I was playing CS with some officemates. It was your typical 5-on-5 in de_dust, with my Terrorist team trying to plant the bomb. Unfortunately, while we still won some rounds, we were getting creamed. The CTs were really good, moving in sync and dispatching us with quick headshots. We were all wondering where these people came from, since they were really really good.

Then my teammate realized something: we were playing against bots! Apparently, there were only 6 human players on the server. The host didn’t like a “mere” 3-on-3 game, so he added 4 bots—and placed them all on his team.

After some angry chat messages, the host reluctantly removed the bots from the game. And we returned to your traditional, mano-il-mano showdown. Needless to say, we did a lot better. The point is, even with some hints that most of the CTs were computer-controlled, from the way they moved like a seamless squad, to the formation they moved themselves into, they looked like the genuine article. At least until the signs were too obvious to ignore. The illusion was helped by the bots’ “conversation” over chat among themselves, in a foreign language (we were using the Thai edition of PodBot).

I wonder, how close are we to fulfilling Turing’s test? How close are we to producing AI that can actually pass off as human? Counter-Strike may be limited by its game system, but its a pretty free-flowing one. And it’s a bit scary when you consider how human-like artificial intelligence can be in such an open-ended scenario.