Any fans of the movie Ex Machina, the TV show Humans, or the sterling work of Tim Urban’s brilliantly understandable science site Wait But Why, will have given a lot of thought to the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI). Some people fear it, some people embrace it. But whichever side you sit on, it’s difficult to argue that its influence on humanity over the next 50 years will be anything other than profound. AI is already at work, powering Siri on your iPhone, providing chatbot customer support, recommending and predicting purchases; everything from fraud detection to driverless cars has an AI brain whirring away in the background. And so does EVE Valkyrie. Some of the pilots you’ll encounter are not human pilots at all, but artificially intelligent bots, inconveniently focused on your destruction.
Thanks to the work of Bromosapien over on the forums, we’ve now got a full list of these binary brawlers. And it’s interesting to note that all the bot names are taken from Norse Mythology. Marvel fans will no doubt be familiar with Thor, Loki, Sif and Odin. But Forseti, Mimir and Delling? Nope, us neither. Helpfully Bromosapien’s full list provides wiki links for more detail around these more obscure Norse characters. So get studying, after all, in the words of Sun Tzu in The Art of War, “if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” Not entirely sure how that relates to EVE: Valkyrie deathmatching, but, you know… it sounds pretty wise.
If you want to know a bit more about the AI in Valkyrie, take a look at this interview with CCP’s lead AI programmer. Who better to tell you what you need to know? No one, that’s who.