Quote:I keep thinking it would be cool if an mmo put the hardware into run a neural net ai for say raid bosses. Each week during downtime you could have the ai learn from the past weeks players attempts to get smarter. The hardware that would need seems like it might still be prohibitive though.
Its not so much that the hardware itself is prohibitively expensive as the scaling required. Keep in mind it was possible to simulate one or two nuerons on a single P3 from 20 years ago. Depending on exactly how complex you want to get it, you could run the AI off of a powerful consumer-grade processor. If you want more speed a couple of GPUs are even better.
The problem is... you'd only be able to do
one raid boss at a time. Or have enough hardware available for all the instances of a raid(and remember that could easily be hundreds).
Then factor in that as the complexity of the server grows, the cost and skill needed to operate it go up exponentially. Right now, DDO is running on a stack of beefy enterprise-grade VM hosts hooked to a SAN. That's simple enough to park ata datacenter colocation and maintain mostly remote. Trying to add a couple dozen cabinets full of GPUs, IB switches, and more high-end SANs not only drives up the cost to a huge degree, it also means you have to start hiring experts to operate and maintain the system(and trust me, these guys do not come cheap).
At that point it would literally be cheaper to hire a bunch of interns and pay them to control raid bosses and play them.

Technically, you are still training a neural net...