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At the fun level, sure. At the fooling me level in a mud, no. (Remember, we're talking about muds here, not chess, for instance.) At PARTS of a mud, I believe an NPC could fool me for a bit, but that's only if you explicitly exclude speech or any sort of relatively parseable by a human and free-form communication generally.
Even at bashing, a mob needs to be able to use free-form communication to appear human. There's too much organization that's achieved by verbal communication. Yes, you can order mobs or speak in reasonably pre-defined ways to get a mob to cooprate, but then you're not fooling anyone obviously.
If you said to me, "What do you suggest as the objective standard for measuring an AI that can fool players within a mud?" (I mis-interpreted the original poster's intent as being to create a mud that could achieve a state in which players and NPCs cannot be told apart.) then I'd reply that the objective test needed is actually the same as the yet-to-be-achieved gold standard in A.I.: An NPC that you can converse with as you might another human. This is the standard for me for the mis-interpreted question because talking to other people is fundamental to a mud. Indeed, I've never seen a text mud that did not allow for free-form written communication in some manner. (There IS a graphical mud for kids that only allows pre-scripted phrases. Even there though one could construct a meta-language based on frequency of the pre-scripted phrases you use and the timing between them that would be free-form communication and thus unattainable by an NPC currently.)
What you said to me was, "What do you suggest as an objective standard for measuring an AI that can fool players within a game." My answer is that you'd have to specify the game.
In a game with heavily restricted options and no free-form communication commonly used by humans (ie my above meta-language example is pretty extreme. If a player was speaking meaningless gibberish in the meta-language, I wouldn't suspect him of being an A.I. simply because I wouldn't expect almost anyone to be using a meta-language in that circumstance.), it's already been achieved. I can't tell the difference between a human and an A.I. in checkers or chess, for instance.
The main reason I objected is because I object to looking at virtual worlds as mere games. They're not. They're much more than games as probably everybody who likes muds enough to read this forum understands at a gut and possibly intellectual level. And it's their much moreness that precludes a mob AI from fooling anyone for very long.
(And again, I'm not saying that this fact precludes them from being good at games or from being fun to interact with.)
I'd say this thread is about dead from my angle. We're arguing about a comment I made resulting from a post I misinterpreted in the first place.
--matt
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