Forget Chess--the Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D

Fans of games like Dungeons & Dragons know that the fun comes, in part, from a creative Dungeon Master--an all-powerful narrator who follows a storyline but has free rein to improvise in response to players' actions and the fate of the dice. This kind of spontaneous yet coherent storytelling is extremely difficult for artificial intelligence, even as AI has mastered more constrained board games such as chess and Go. The best text-generating AI programs too often produce confused and disjointed prose. So some researchers view spontaneous storytelling as a good test of progress toward more intelligent machines. An attempt to build an artificial Dungeon Master offers hope that machines able to improvise a good storyline might be built.