Perception As Intelligence

I've been a big fan of Douglas Hofstadter ever since "Godel Escher Bach", and one of his ideas is that perception is not only important for intelligent beings, but it's the greatest part of intelligence. His projects often focus on creating a program that can perceive the essential character of a situation. After the situation is well understood, finding a reasonable course of action is often trivial.

I think that's a great piece of perception on Hofstadter's part. How do you figure 24 times 4? You might perceive that 24 is one less than 25, so 4*24 must be four less than 4*25 or one hundred. After you understand the unusual nature of 24, it is a simple task to see that 4*24 is 96.

Martial artists tells many real life stories of wizened old masters easily defeating opponents because of their great perception. Where I might only see a big guy running at me and freak out, a master would immediately see, "He's overreaching and leaning too far forward," or "He's leaving a big opening on his left". Check out this demonstration of a Judo expert comfortably defeating a powerful and skilled opponent. He just perceives the balance of his opponent clearly.

I wish artificial intelligence in games would focus more on perception. The tendency I've seen in games like Halo (And I admit I haven't seen very much recently- I'd like to study more of the small pay-for-download games on say, X-Box live) is to make a very large list of scripted actions and pre-determine the important characteristics of a playing field. An intelligence based on Hofstadter's Copycat analogy engine, for example, would be much simpler and have surprising results. (And be able to be used on custom fields without modification.) I feel that today's smaller games must focus on "emergent" qualities rather than a huge database of scripted actions. An artificial intelligence focusing on perception would be much simpler and still have very clever human-like action.