The real cloud ai/cpu/gpu

Development
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No.

When you say “faster internet” what you mean is “higher bandwidth”. Bandwidth has nothing to do with “how long it takes to get to your screen”. What decides how fast it gets to your screen is the speed of light and how long packets get held up in routers.

No.

This kind of technology, by which I mean electron-based internet and computing, has very nearly reached the limit of what is physically possible to do without violating relativity. You can only make semiconductors so small or quantum effects will make it impossible to predict where electrons are going, and information can only travel so far in a fraction of a nanosecond.

Fibre-optic cables have been used for long-distance connections for years because the absence of repeater-stations make them cheaper and more reliable. Getting a fibre-optic cable put in the few miles from your house to the nearest central will give a latency improvement measured in microseconds.

AI refers to basically any form of code that’ll let a computer make a decision about anything, including “how does a tower react to an enemy coming near it”.

“True intelligence” is basically just a very complex piece of programming that makes the decision-making seem capable of creative thinking, possibly employing quantum phenomena for true randomization. For example, the human mind implement genetic code in a wetware processor that is unpredictable enough I actually believe I have a choice about writing this sentence.

What the OP is referring to is the idea of having someone buy a computer, run a game on it, and then send you the output while receiving input.

The “advantage” to doing this is that instead of paying the price of a computer all at once you get to pay it on a monthly/hourly/whatever basis and when you aren’t using it someone else can do so (while also paying for the privilege).

The disadvantage is that you have to deal with internet latency on everything you do - at best your cursor will be rendered client-side so that moving your mouse wont come with an X ms delay. Oh yeah and that’s assuming you don’t experience any bandwidth bottlenecks, intermittent disconnects, or desire to play singleplayer games while flying/on a train/sitting in the back of a car. Aaand someone’s going to be making money or they wouldn’t bother offering to set up computers for you to use.

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Well I don’t have much to tell you except read about google fiber and next gen Cloud computing. Titanfall is using cloud AI so I really don’t know what to tell you. Let’s try to right our wrongs so we can keep this discussion relevant and on topic. You are right about bandwidth, I just don’t know if you have read about the possibilities of google fiber and cloud computing. Because of google fiber Kansas city was getting stock market readings of when to by sell and trade a couple seconds before anyone in the world could see them so they closed down google fiber for about a week, probably to make some changes for fairness in the stock market.

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This discussion is about Cloud computing AI/CPU/GPU not so much internet so lets forget about that part and stay on topic shall we. If you are unsure about what this means, find out, then post. I will be doing the same before I make another slight error.

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I lol’ed.

You do realise that cloud computing and internet is really rather closely linked, right? This is not a rhetoric question, I’m honestly starting to wonder.

For example…

In the old, ooold, days, CPUs and RAM was much cheaper than internet bandwidth, so games programmers would do everything they could to minimize bandwidth use even if it cost a few extra CPU cycles. For example, a game would run an AI both on the server and the client, synchronizing the two instances every so often to make up for slight differences in player-locations and such.

This is why, if you lose connection to the internet while playing a game like EVE Online, NPCs might continue to do stuff and react to new situations, but any player-ships nearby will just continue doing what they were when the connection dropped (for example, they might continue orbiting a ship while shooting it until it’s destroyed, then fly off in a straight line).

These days, though? Both hardware and bandwidth are dirt cheap, especially if you buy bulk. If you’re making a new gaming console, which has to be dirt-cheap or people will just get a PC instead, you can choose to send all the movements and actions of each AI to every player, basically treating them as players, costing you a few kbps of bandwidth but gaining you a few cycles on the likely underpowered* local CPU. The price-difference is small enough that I could believe microsoft set it up that way just to use it for publicity.

*) Putting an underpowered CPU in a gaming console actually makes a lot of sense, I mean think about it, when was the last time you were unable to run a game because your CPU was too slow, rather than being limited by your unupgraded graphics card? I still think “ooh cloud-based AI to make a shinier game!” was more of a PR stunt than an actual shininess increase, AIs really don’t take a lot of processing power.

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Ruinat answered this too, but I’d like to point out that I addressed this already:

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Titanfall does cloud AI in a much different way allowing your computer to bypass AI allowing for better visuals than what has been done before.

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wut?
bypass AI? You mean AI algorithms are run on the server rather than the local CPU? - Please read my post and Ruinat’s. This is nothing new. Seriously.

better visuals? Because more CPU = more shiny? nope.

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/me waits for the conspiracy theories…oh, wait…

georgeman, is it you?

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Respawn lead artist Joel Emslie had told Eurogamer at E3 that Titanfall, an Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC game, would make use of the cloud for AI and physics computations, and Shiring backed this assertion up. 

Dedicated servers eradicate the problems associated with player hosted servers, Shiring said, as well as grant other benefits. “You can get even more CPU on your dedicated servers to do new things like dozens of AI and giant autopilot titans,” he said. Matchmaking is “lightning fast” and the player experience is “so much better.” 

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The cloud will provide Xbox One developers with the CPU and storage equivalent of three extra consoles, claims Xbox incubation and prototyping group manager Jeff Henshaw.

Speaking to OXM, Henshaw said it was telling developers to assume that they would have roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game in the cloud.

He added that this would help devs create bigger, persistent worlds.

“We’re provisioning for developers for every physical Xbox One we build, we’re provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud,” said Henshaw.

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Dovahkiin​111, please heed Keith’s warning and try not to multi post.

None of the PR you have copy pasta’d contradicts anything either I or Runiat have said. It’s called dedicated servers. It’s nothing new.

Lol I had the same thought an hour ago.

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What makes Titanfall different for the cloud?

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Different from what? Previous games?
Console games typically did not use dedicated servers - they were hosted by one of the players either transparently or if a player chose to host (I assume this varied between games)

Xbox Live Compute is hosting for dedicated servers for xbox.
Technology wise it’s nothing new - PC games have had dedicated servers for years and it’s kinda weird that consoles have continued without dedicated servers for so long.

Without Xbox Live Compute, Respawn would still probably have released a dedicated Titanfail server or hosted their own. There would not have been any special PR stuff about it.

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Thanks for the clarification. They are touting like it’s something truly new.

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As someone who makes a living working in a UC collaboration team, and have to listen to the word cloud touted every 15 seconds, there is nothing more frustrating. Cloud is a terrible word made up by a marketing moron to enable her customers (yes it was a female that coined it) to better understand hosted solutions, whether off prem or on prem. The word itself is meaningless, adds no value and is designed for technology illiterate people. Please stop using it. “hosted solution” - that’s your terminology if you have more IQ points than seven.

Although I did skim read this thread, I think its fair to say OP is trolling with the statement that google fiber fixes the internet and goes to space, or whatever it is that he said.

But just so we are all clear, cloud is a terrible word for an off-premise hosted solution. When the day comes that a server sitting in a data center is able to to do gaming CPU/GPU computations and feed that back to an end user without performance degradation I will be truly shocked. Hell, I work for the biggest Telco in our country and our SAP rollouts that are “cloud based” (ie off prem hosted solutions) still experience lag (noticable) when being run on a LOCAL network from a clients data centre to a remote sales office. Let alone when delivered via IP/VPN (IP is the internet) or from a third party provider.

To say that an enjoyable gaming experience with all the hard work being done in a data centre somewhere may be “at our doorstep” is utterly absurd. One of the biggest roadblocks of clients adopting cloud technology is the end user experience is significantly diminished vs a locally hosted solution (aka lag makes it a bad experience which adds no value) and thats when talking about basic applications for sales & operations teams. Let alone HD gaming.

i’d like to cherry pick a few statements:

“we could be waiting another 5 years for fiber and cloud to be seamlessly integrated into a doable method for multiplayer.”
-that is like saying we are waiting for cows to be integrated with grass on a field before the milk we receive arrives fast enough. Are you trolling? Fiber and cloud cannot be “integrated”. Fiber is a means by which to access the internet, cloud is a bad word for a server sitting in a data centre. What are you even going on about here?

“I know the internet is considered cloud” - Honestly, are you trolling? THE INTERNET IS NOT CLOUD. Data stored in the cloud is accessed via the internet. The internet is not cloud. The internet is not cloud.

"This kind of technology is still in its early years " - No. Very simply, no.

“Because of google fiber Kansas city was getting stock market readings of when to by sell and trade a couple seconds before anyone in the world could see them so they closed down google fiber for about a week, probably to make some changes for fairness in the stock market.” - Source? This sounded ridiculous, so I searched the internets and could not find one single article on this.

“slight error” - also loled.

“dedicated servers eradicate the problems associated with player hosted servers” - Across all your posts, this is maybe the one thing you are right about.

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Here’s a tip: don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Especially not when it’s written by Microsoft’s marketing department. Dedicated servers have been part of PC gaming for longer than I have.

The words themselves are meaningless to the majority of humanity. The word “cloud” adds the value that it’s commonly understood to have a meaning, even if that meaning varies or is entirely unknown, to most English-speaking users of the internet. If you’re going to be a language-snob (which I entirely approve of, btw) at least the first letter of each sentence.

I mean, seriously, if everyone was technologically literate how would I ever find a job?

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touché and thanks