AI tries (and fails) to make its way through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

How much trouble did you have working your way through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney? You likely hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, but eventually made your way through each of the cases and saw the game to its conclusion. Well, the same can’t be said for various AI models.

Hao AI Lab wanted to see if four different AI models could reason their way through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in an effort to test their memory, reasoning skills, visual understanding and strategic decision-making. You might think this would be a breeze for AI, but not a single one of the models could complete the full game.

Two of the four models managed to complete the penultimate episode in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, but that’s about as good as it got. If anything, this shows we’ve got a long way to go with AI in terms of measuring up to what a real person can do. Perhaps the most interesting thing to come of these tests is the fact that Capcom was made aware of them.

Ace Attorney developer Masakazu Sugimori found out about the AI tests and shared a lengthy statement on how things played out. You can see his full comments on the matter below.

“How should I put this, I never thought the game I worked on so desperately 25 years ago would come to be used in this way, and overseas at that (laughs). I find it interesting how the AI models get stumped in the first episode. [Ace Attorney director Shu] Takumi and [executive producer Shinji] Mikami were very particular about the difficulty level of Episode 1 – it’s supposed to be simple for a human. Maybe this kind of deductive power is the strength of humans?

The reason why Takumi and Mikami were so particular about balancing the difficulty level of Ace Attorney’s first episode was because ‘there was no other game like it in the world at the time.’ It had to be a difficulty that would be acceptable to a wide playerbase, but it had to avoid being insultingly simple too. They were going for the kind of difficulty that gives you a sense of satisfaction when the solution hits you.”

[Ace Attorney developer Masakazu Sugimori]