Artificial Stupidity

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<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam <bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls —bash.org quote #240849

In almost every video game ever made, there are some characters controlled by the computer. These can be categorized into one of three groups:

• Set Pattern — the computer actually makes no decisions; all enemies will make the same moves every time regardless of what the player does. Most of the enemies in Super Mario Bros. fit this category.
• AI Roulette — again, the computer is not making decisions per se; it is simply choosing a move at random. This type is often seen in turn-based Roleplaying Games.
• Analytical, or Responsive — the computer chooses a move based on the situation; the ghosts in Pac-Man fall into this category, which in 1980 was considered impressive.

It is in this third group that Artificial Stupidity can be found. AS is when the AI can select a move for its character(s), and consistently chooses ones that are completely stupid. While it is very rarely included on purpose as a balancing factor, such as to balance out the fact that The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, Artificial Stupidity is often a result of poor programming; the programmers simply didn't program the AI not to make that move, and when the AI evaluates its choices, the poor move looks like the best one. (It's far more likely that The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard will be introduced to compensate for Artificial Stupidity rather than the other way round.)

Artificial Stupidity is particularly visible in Role Playing Games, be they turn-based games like the majority of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, or strategy-based games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea, simply because it is in these types of games that the decision-making process is the most important, and therefore, the most visible. It can potentially exist in any game involving an analytical or responsive AI, though, and the more analytical the game, the easier it is to get an AI that's, well, stupid. For instance, even good chess games can suffer from a version of this, called the "horizon effect".

Differs from AI Roulette because AI Roulette chooses moves randomly. Artificial Stupidity puts some "thought" in its moves, making the most obvious stupidities less likely but creating more consistent general incompetence.

Suicidal Overconfidence is a specific case of this that's usually less about bad programming or making the game easier than about allowing the player to have something to do.

The Escort Mission is often a variety of this.

The opposite of Artificial Stupidity is Artificial Brilliance, where the AI makes surprisingly good decisions that convincingly appear intelligent. See The Guards Must Be Crazy for this trope as relates to stealth games.

Note that, for the sake of argument, this trope typically only covers situations that a player can be reasonably expected to enter over the course of normal gameplay. It's hardly fair to blame the programmers, after all, if you use a cheat device to get special weapons ahead of time and the AI has no idea what's going on.

This trope is not to be confused with Obfuscating Stupidity Stupidity, though some games that computers can inherently play well will use Artificial Obfuscating Stupidity to balance the difficulty.

Examples of Artificial Stupidity include:

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• Adventure Games
• Fighting Games
  • Beat'Em Up
• Puzzle Games
• Racing Games
• Roleplaying Games
  • Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
• Strategy Games

• Simulation Games

• First-Person Shooters

Action Game

• Enter the Matrix has three driving levels. If you play as Niobe, you get to be the driver while Ghost takes shots at the enemy vehicles, and if you're playing as Ghost you get to be the gunner while Niobe drives through the level. The problem? Apparently the AI-controlled Niobe completely flunked out of driving school, because she can't go five seconds without crashing into something and more than likely getting stuck (this is most aggravating in the final driving level, where you're trying to escape from the Twins, who are following after and shooting at you, and are also completely invincible.)
• In Saint's Row 2, pedestrians will often jump to one side if they think they player will drive over them. However, at least as often as not, they throw themselves headlong onto the street, where they're likely to get run over by another NPC driver, or by the player if he was only barely on the sidewalk or if he was only taking a brief detour onto the sidewalk.
  • There are also certain roads that cabs seem to have... trouble with. More specifically, they become, to borrow Yahtzee's phrase, 'pants-on-head retarded'. The cabs tend to spawn at the end of a long, straight road... then turn around and start driving off in a random direction, taking the longest possible route to get to you. If they don't just explode. Or sometimes they'll spawn, but, for some reason, immediately shift into 'normal' NPC cabs which you can steal, rather than ride in. Also fits as a Good Bad Bug.
  • Airplane pilots seem to be a panicky lot in SR2, too. Shoot them once (with any gun) on the runway (which is the only place to really find NPC airplanes), and they'll immediately veer off the runway and crash into the closest bit of scenery, usually exploding in a giant fireball.
    • When you attempt to steal a vehicle that is also on your junkyard list, not only will the cops psychically know and immediately pounce on you, but the driver of said car will invariably panic and veer off the road in a random direction. The chance that this mad dash across pedestrian zones and off cliffs ends with the car despawning, crashing into a semi or disappearing into the ocean is proportional to the length of time you had to wait for it to show up in the first place. Oh, and if he hits something black and white and blue then you get wanted stars. It seems the only way to steal a car on your junkyard list without dealing with this is by shooting the driver.
  • Get a police car, drive on the rightmost lane and activate the siren. Cars in front of you will turn onto the sidewalk to avoid you. Cars in the middle lane will turn across your lane and stop there. For additional fun, try this on a highway bridge and watch the semis run the civilians off the road in their dash to get out of your way.
  • The nuclear plant island should never be navigated by car. It is crammed with security vehicles that will do things like accelerate at high speed out of a side street and plow into you, rear-end you when you stop for a red light, or run over a pedestrian and proceed to chase you for manslaughter. It is virtually impossible to spend longer than a minute in this area at the wheel of a truck without getting wanted stars.
• Space Pirates, in the stealth section of Metroid: Zero Mission, will raise an alarm and mercilessly chase you if they spot you. However, you can cause them to call off the alarm if you can keep them from spotting you for a short period of time (or going to a prescripted area to shake the heat). This is despite the fact that you are the one solely responsible for the destruction of their leader not three hours ago and you are now unarmored and vulnerable. It's also worth noting that the shots they fire at you will kill each other if you can line them up right.
  • In Metroid Fusion, the SA-X is occasionally unable to figure out how to shoot you if you aren't running away full-tilt.
• In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, you eventually encounter a human boss who can use any power used against him, but it is automatically overridden by any new power. That's fine, and obviously the best way to beat him is to use a stupid power against him. The trouble is that he never clues into the fact that his new power is ridiculous (he does, after all, have a knife he could be using), such as lashing out with a Cave Troll's tongue attack that doesn't extend past his dramatically outstretched arm.
  • Sadly, his Knife is even MORE puny then his new Tongue attack. His power could be a Game Breaker anyway if he had any actual control over it.
  • Use the Student Witch attack on him, so that he spends the remainder of the battle trying to throw cats at you.
    • This is actually a bit of a Guide Dang It, since the game never tells you about the trick outright (sure, he visibly steals his primary attack from a Malachi, but there's no indication it's automatic) - and if you don't know it, the fight is tough. (It's also tough in Julius Mode - turns out that power works on subweapons, too. Sure, you can give him Yoko's "power palm", but if you forget about it and hit him with an axe?)
• The enemy AI in the Armored Core games, especially on the PS 1 and PlayStation 2, are capable of truly staggering feats of incompetence. Choose to fight AC's in the right arena and they will:

A) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter. B) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall. C) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall and somehow killing themselves. D) All of the above

• • They have also been witnessed boosting out of the combat area for no reason, giving the player the victory by default. As you can imagine, there are myriad ways of rapidly climbing the arena ranks by exploiting the stupidity of its inhabitants. But the real problems start when From Software, rather than attempting to program better AI, decided to compensate for the computers' stupidity by giving the AI controlled ACs capabilities that far exceed what is possible, or sane, and in Armored Core 2 even equipped the AI with parts that didn't exist.
• In the stealth sections of Batman: Arkham Asylum, the Mooks rarely ever bother to look up. It's a little bit more frequent in the harder difficulty levels, but still.
  • And then there's also this.
    • They also have no periphral vision whatsoever, except for the insane inmates who have a perfect line of sight.
    • If it wasn't for their constant conversations, you'd assume they were all deaf, too, given you can stick one of them in a Dragon Sleeper (complete with barely muffled groans) with their buddy none the wiser ten feet away.
• The guards in Assassin's Creed will sometimes throw you off a high ledge, then jump down after you. You can survive the resulting falling damage. They can't. In 2 you often lose thieves to the idiots trying to keep up with Ezio and jumping from too high or failing jumps.
  • The Multiplayer Tutorial AI dummy in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood won't care if the player approaches him in an unusual manner, and will only jog away from the player if a chase is activated, never sprinting.
• Grand Theft Auto San Andreas features pretty solid AI in most cases, but it breaks down in some areas. On the freeway, the AI can't seem to handle the speed at which it drives, resulting in a lot of accidents, even with no player intervention. If the player stays put long enough, massive pileups and riots inevitably occur and don't end until the player leaves the area.
  • Civilian drivers are actually dumb cars-on-rails until nudged, shot, or otherwise "awakened", at which point they become truly AI controlled and subject to proper physics (almost certainly for performance). In places, the map's "rails" seem to be set up wrong, and vehicles either accelerate or turn well beyond their actual capabilities, or outright spawn facing the wrong way then tween into place. Freeway pileups are usually a result of "rail" and "true" vehicles interacting badly.
    • A similar sort of thing seems to happen in areas with particularly steep hills, especially San Fierro. And it. Is. Hilarious.
    • Also, pretty much every car that needs to make a right turn, is going to do so from the left lane, and vice versa for left turns. And that seems to be the most basic rule for the game's driving AI, but apparently it wasn't. It seems like the only realistic thing the other drivers do in the game is to high-tail it out of there when if they hear gunshots.
  • If you engage in a gang war, sometimes the enemy gang members will run down to the end of the block just to do a U-turn and run on the other side of the sidewalk. Sometimes this ranges to being miles away from the actual war zone but if the game is savvy enough, you're rewarded with the next wave or getting the area. Most of the time though you're stuck waiting around for them to come back because if you try to leave, the game pressures you to stay there.
  • Cops who in no way can get to their original car, will usually run out onto the street and jack a civilian's car and drive off in that. Or more hilariously, a fellow officer's car.
  • Dubbed the suicidal photographer, this fellow stands at the edge of a cliff taking pictures of the city nearby. After he's done he just walks in a straight line into the water and dies. This happens everytime.
  • Emergency vehicles make no effort to avoid civilians and will usually run a lot of peds over just to save one. Aggrevating when it runs over a mission important NPC.
  • Unlike the previous games, San Andreas averts Super Drowning Skills, and CJ can swim. However, this isn't extended to anyone else, and if you have a Wanted level, there's no end to the line of cops that will jump in to get you and immediately drown.
  • It is not just San Andreas, either. Much of the Grand Theft Auto series has apparent Artificial Stupidity, though at the same time, much of it's ambiguous whether it was a matter of programming or of deliberate portrayal. Grand Theft Auto II features fellow carjackers who drive into cars already on the verge of exploding, civilians who run around in circles when a tank is driving through an alley they are in, and cops in a vehicle running over cops who are pursuing you on foot. However, given the nature of the GTA series, one should not rule out the possibility that they are portraying people that way on purpose.
  • Planes are also tied to 'rails'. This frequently makes them disregard tall buildings, trees, hills or other particuarly tall objects.
  • NPCs who are falling into the water know how to escape their vehicle and swim, but fail to grasp the concept of finding a staircase or beach to exit the water. They mostly waddle uselessly next to a ledge.
  • NPCs often crowd around scenes of carnage. This would happen even if the scene involves a flaming vehicle which might go off at any minute.
  • NPCs on fire never have the ability to stop, drop and roll that the protoganist has. They often just run around until their health runs out and dies.
• In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the guards provide a fairly solid challenge without going to brutal measures to catch the player (difficulty dependant of course). However, patrolling guards when not faced with a left turn, will ALWAYS turn to the right including when they are simply turning around. This effectivly means that the player can stand next to a patrolling guard and not be seen, providing he always stands on the guards left side.
  • Which is far from the worst or only problem. For instance, you can shoot guards with tranquilizer guns, which mostly avert Instant Sedation except on Very Easy difficulty, but regardless of how long it takes, will cause the target to abruptly keel over with a grunt and start snoring. Other guards will find nothing unusual about this if they find a sleeping guard, and will simply kick them awake, even if they saw them keel over. This is particularly silly when you hit a guard who regularly sends status reports by radio (or interrupt a guard with a radio), and a group of armed soldiers come to investigate. After kicking him awake, one of the soldiers will radio back to report that there was nothing wrong before they leave.
• In Dead Rising, it's not uncommon for Frank to be escorting a couple of survivors and, even though you've given weapons to as many of them as you can, for them to stand there calling for help while they're being eaten alive by zombies and doing absolutely nothing to defend themselves. This can be especially frustrating if you're handling a survivor that can't carry a weapon or if you yourself are in the middle of being attacked. This is even MORE frustrating if you were attacked while trying to help the idiot and you all die because said idiot will not even push the zombies (all the survivors are capable of pushing).
  • They also have no concept of retreat, and will stand there fighting off a horde of zombies, no matter how overwhelmed they get. Leading to the tactic of mashing the call button to make them move their sorry asses.
  • Also, don't give them a gun. Unless you like getting caught in friendly crossfire.
• In Gears of War, Locusts (the main enemy in the game) are supposed to dynamically move around and take cover in response to your team's position. However, nine times out of ten, they will, in a pitched firefight, leap over the cover to reach a better place, leaving them horribly open for an explosive headshot.
  • In the sequel this was fixed, but the AI has even more pitiful failings; enemies will run straight into security lasers, clearly-visible proxy mines, a sentry turret's line of sight, etc.
  • When given an explosive weapon A Is will choose to destroy themselves. But only if you are not within range.
• In Grand Theft Auto 3, random emergency vehicles will sometimes speed up the drive to the mafia don's house, slam headfirst into his garage door and continue to grind against it until their vehicles explode.
  • Everyone in Liberty City (apart from Claude) seems absolutely incapable of aiming a rocket launcher in any direction but down. And they actually seem to be aware of this, since if a pedestrian were to have a rocket launcher on them, they would run up to their target, and fire the rocket at the ground, killing both the target and themselves in the process. By San Andreas, this has been corrected so that pedestrians can fire rocket launchers at what is in front of them. *gulp*
• In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: The Game, the enemies often have Ungodly Dodge abilities. However, this is often counteracted by their tendency to stand near gas tanks and then blow them up.
  • And that's not the end of it: in the rare occasion that you have backup with you, it will blindly charge into battle and be destroyed, thus leaving you to complete the mission by yourself, one hundred times more efficiently than if they were around to help.
• Resident Evil 5 shows that we may have reached The Singularity. Its AI Is a Crapshoot. Sometimes it's great, picking off enemies with relative efficiency with reasonable choices in weapons. Other times, if you're laying claymore mines to set up a dastardly trap while fighting a big boss, the AI will quietly follow in your footsteps picking them up.
  • Sheva's AI reaches the pinnacle of stupidity in the first battle with Wesker. First she stands still and gets badly injured (or killed on the higher difficulties), then runs off to hide, then TRIES TO FIGHT Jill ALONE and, as a result, dies. If she's lucky enough to survive, then she'll try to link up with you, leaving her side of the fight unfinished and bringing a very dangerous combatant with her to help Wesker. You cannot complete this fight solo without hiding.
  • It's pretty much concluded that this was a lot nastier than just bad programming, that they intentionally made Sheva's AI unbelievably stupid to make the game practically unwinnable without a second player, which often requires a second copy of the game, second system, and online accounts.
  • In the very beginning of its predecessor, Resident Evil 4, there is a section of tripwire that will detonate upon contact with either the player or enemies. The pissed-off villagers apparently forgot who set the explosives in the first place, because they will run right into it and kill themselves if you position yourself right.
  • Also involving dynamite. On some occasions, if you get close to dynamite-throwing Ganados, they may rush at you and try to grab you. They may or may not have lit the fuse to said dynamite. They might also gesture and shout orders/alerts to their comrades, often standing among them with a sparking stick of dynamite. Of course, this and the above example make a bit more sense when you realize the Las Plagas is likely turning their higher reasoning capabilities into Swiss cheese.
• The Mummy Returns is hardly a pinnacle of gaming history, and the AI Medjai shooting at you will often miss at super-close range if you run back and forth a lot, but the best is the boss fight against Ardeth Bay for Imhotep in Cairo, the second mission. After killing all of his Medjai guards, you can simply back him into a corner and mash the kick button, resulting in a never-ending stream of kicks to the head that Ardeth can never get past or block. Since you can't kill him and just have to hold him back until your train leaves, this makes the boss fight less of an issue than the health-draining cats.
• Driver 2 Advanced really did stretch the bar at the time for the Game Boy Advanced. It was remarkably fluid despite the pixel count being lower than fifteen for particular sprites. The control scheme and driving performed decently for the extremely limited physics engine it was rooted to. But the catch here is, a felony can be really unpredictable unless you try and figure out how to piss off the police and blinking pedestrian sprites. Why is this stupid on the A.I.'s end? Particular illegal crimes such as driving on the sidewalk and stealing cars would occasionally become "legal" and no authorities will pursue.
• In The Godfather, expect that pedestrians will somehow, in an attempt to jump out of the way of your car, instead fling themselves into your path. Especially annoying, when you consider that any contact between a moving car and a civilian, at any speed, is almost universally a One-Hit Kill.
• In The Uncanny X-Men for the NES, one-player mode would saddle the player with a computer-controlled ally so unfathomably stupid that players found it most convenient to get the enemies to put it out of its misery.

The Angry Video Game Nerd: You could do better if you played the game blindfolded. That's no exaggeration.

• In Grand Theft Auto IV, enemies will attempt to use the cover system just as much as you do. While most of the time, enemies will use this cover effectively, they do on occasion take cover behind objects that are not very good at deflecting bullets or won't cover them effectively. So, you may spy a supposedly highly-trained N.O.O.S.E agent take cover behind a stack of cardboard boxes or a fire hydrant.
  • The AI used in the street races drives like a blind moron on drugs. It usually ends up overshooting corners because it doesn't slow down in time, plows right into other cars instead of trying to dodge and occasionally even manages to veer off a straight road.
  • Fly up in a helicopter with a high wanted level. Hover over a body of water (the ocean next to Francis International is a good example), and watch as the police attempt to pursue you. They seem to not understand the concept that they can not drive their car up to you, or that there is an ocean in the way. After a few minutes, half the local precinct will probably be bobbing about in the water like corks.
• In the first Tenchu game, you can swim but your enemies have Super Drowning Skills. They apparently don't know this, because if you are spotted by an enemy you can simply jump into water and watch them follow you in to drown.

Sports Game

• In Super Swing Golf Pangya, lower-tier opponents will make the most blatantly idiotic shots.
• A discussion of the AI stupidity in Madden NFL would take all night, but one that deserves mention is that the AI has serious trouble with quarterbacks doing rollouts. If the AI is tasked with guarding the receiver and the QB rolls to his side, the AI defender will often come up to play the QB and then get indecisive, leaving both the pass and the run wide open.
• In Backyard Baseball, if there is a person on third base, the fielders automatically throw to home. Usually it is an outfielder that does this, and almost always a run is still scored.
• For some reason the AI in FIFA 2000 (and its spin-off, The FA Premier League Stars) was totally incapable of dealing with set-pieces correctly. This meant that whenever you got a free kick, half of the time the computer team didn't even bother setting up the wall, and when it did the wall tended to be completely out of position. Corner-kicks were even worse, as your own players weren't marked correctly and the opposing goalkeeper was far too slow to react, meaning that so long that you were able to get plenty of corners, you could ratchet up huge scorelines even on the hardest difficulty settings.
• Mario Basketball 3-on-3. You control one character at a time. Your two teammates do nothing while you desparately try to avoid getting the ball stolen. The ball falls right next to them? They still do nothing.
• In Pro Cycling Manager 2011, when a breakaway occurs, a team start chasing a group containing their own riders like it was one of their worst rivals. Pack takes them back in. New breakaway, some different riders, one from before mentioned team is in. Same team takes up the chase and wins. New breakaway, same teams, minus the one chasing before takes part. The team chasing before has stopped, because they weren't destroying it for their own team anymore.

Party Game

• Mario Party 8 has King Boo's Haunted Hideaway, which is a randomly-generated map that changes each time you play it. The AI seems to not plan ahead at path forks, and it will choose a path even if it knows the next fork on that side has one path leading to a dead end and a Whomp blocking the other, and that it doesn't have enough coins to pay the Whomp's toll.
  • Basically, when the computer in Mario Party isn't being a cheating bastard, they have an IQ of -8. They will buy items for easy access to the Star, even if the cost of the item puts them below the coins needed for the Star. All the freakin' time.
  • It gets worse on the investment boards like Windmillville and Koopa's Tycoon Town. Most of the time, they will invest every single coin they have, even if it's not necessary. It makes it impossible for computers to invest on the building that is right next to it, unless they keep getting low rolls and winning minigames.
  • The computer will also use items to roll multiple dice blocks to get to the star when they don't have enough coins to buy a star.
  • One particular case of the HARD AI in the first game being incompetent is pointed out by The Runaway Guys when Peach, otherwise a luck-manipulating bastard on Hard, proceeds to get the Ground Pound Coin Minigame and use a total of 9 ground pounds to find the 5 "correct" posts.
  • The Easy AI is this on purpose -- it's possible to win several Mario Party 2 minigames against Easy bots without even doing anything.
    • 7 games later and they still haven't fixed this.

Wide Open Sandbox

• The tournament AI in Mount & Blade apparently decides that the best way to win is to drive into a wall. And then get fenced in by dismounted horses.
• One of the chief reasons why it's practically impossible to not kill any civilians by accident while actively avoiding contact in a ground vehicle in Prototype. It seems like once you induced panic in them, they'll abandon almost all of their reliance on their senses. That's also assuming you aren't convinced of their intention to commit suicide in the face of the game's setting.
  • Oh, Prototype. Thou art a shining example of this trope. Where civilians show absolutely no regard for their own safety, the most dangerous thing a Marine can face is another Marine and where highly-trained military personnel can TD Dance off of a platform to their deaths. It makes you a bit less guilty for killing them, because they genuinely come across as Too Dumb to Live
    • The slightest disruption in traffic flow can cause huge pile ups. Tanks will just drive over anything in the way.
• Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is a crowning achievement in Artificial Stupidity. Frequently, enemy soldiers will run in front of vehicles, throw grenades at their own vehicles, crash said vehicles when at even the slightest deviation, attempt to plow their vehicles under your tank causing the game to assume the tank has run them over, drown themselves, run off of building ledges and generally kill themselves in a variety of amusing ways. This can be frustrating for numerous reasons, chief among them that Chinese RPG soldiers fire thermobaric rockets that do massive damage to you and the scenery. In fact, it is generally impossible to capture all the HVT's alive, because they will kill themselves or die at the hands of their subordinate troops.
  • The original was as bad, if not worse. Civilian vehicles would instant swerve into you even though you were in the other lane and in no way a threat (as far as they knew). Combatants would drive their jeeps into your tank, which was about as effective as you'd expect, and AI drivers would often run into the adamantium walls known as trees.
• Dead Rising's survivors were, to put it bluntly, idiots. Half the time, they never followed you or would run off on their own, and giving them a weapon would sometimes result in them attacking you by accident. The sequel improved the AI significantly.
• In the X-Universe (especially Terran Conflict) series of games, the Autopilot on all the ships loves to smash itself into the nearest asteroid at max speed, or veer into the path of 4 km long destroyers. Then you turn on the Time accelerator to make the slow autopilot dock faster. It Got Worse. X fans frequently refer to the autopilot as the "auto-pillock", and some believe it consists of a gerbil (or lemming) in a box, with a rough sketch of the sector..
  • Player owned capital ships will gleefully jump at exactly the same time to the exact same warpgate - into each other.

Other games

• Video games for Yu-Gi-Oh!! have a particularly poor track record in this area. While some of the games' idiotic moves can be justified by the fact that the AI couldn't possibly know the identity of your facedown cards, and that the kind of analysis that would allow a player to even make the right guesses can be really difficult even for human players, some of the cases are a little more obviously Artificial Stupidity.
  • Then you have Mokuba, for whom this trope is invoked intentionally. What a digital dummy!
    • To give you the idea of how dumb he is, his second strongest monster is Kanan The Swordmistress, a normal monster with 1400 ATK and 1400 DEF. He summons none of his monsters in defense mode, letting you just keep knocking them down. His entire strategy is to draw one monster, Cyber Stein, which has the ability to summon a fusion monster. This is the only way you can lose to him, cause if he does this, he'll summon Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon.
  • In many of the earlier games, such as Eternal Duelist Soul, at harder levels, the AI essentially knew the ATK and DEF of any of your facedown monsters, and would make its decisions whether or not to attack based on that. Some of the "good" duelists like Yami Yugi go at you with cards that technically can destroy yours in battle...and then leaves them right open to a strong counterattack when the player is able to capitalize on the fact that they left a monster with 1000-1100 ATK in attack mode at the end of their turn. Attack! Attack! Attack! meets Artificial Stupidity here.
  • The AI in Tag Force 2 is considered one of the worst examples of this in a Yu-Gi-Oh game, to the point where it seems like the game is actively trying to sabotage your efforts when you play a tag duel.
    • For instance you might have a monster that can't be destroyed in battle while it's in attack position, and a trap that stops all damage you take as long as you have a monster out, effectively making you invincible while that trap is out, as long as you don't switch that one monster to defense position. Your partner will switch her to defense position as soon as your opponent plays a monster with more attack then her.
    • The best example came from a Tag Force 4 video, when the AI used Prideful Roar against Clear Vice Dragon. The AI paid 2800 Life, took more than double that in damage, and promptly lost.
    • While the AI is occasionally competent during duels, it gets really bad during the minigames. For instance, Tag Force 2 features a 'dodgeball' minigame, it's basically a matter of using different forms of ammo to KO 2 AI opponents. Unfortunately, several characters are prone to standing directly behind your character and throwing a bowling ball (1 hit KO)
  • In Dark Duel Stories, the A Is have a bad habit of offering high-ATK monsters as tributes to summon something just as strong or even weaker, example: Offering "Jirai Gumo"(2200ATK/100DEF; it is interesting to note that this is the strongest LV 4 monster in the game, plus he is stripped of his detrimental effect) as a tribute to Tribute Summon "Catapult Turtle" (1000ATK/2000DEF). Might I also add the AI will also tribute monsters which have been equipped with two spell cards without hesitating, so if he powered up his "Tripwire Beast" to 2200ATK/2300DEF and also had Mountain activated, increasing the original ATK/DEF by 30% to a grand total of 2560ATK/2690DEF, it's not unsurprising for the AI to tribute it for a weaker monster such as "Morinphen", a LV 5 monster with poor stats (1550ATK/1300DEF).
    • The AI also likes to use monsters who have lower ATK than DEF to attack, as long as the ATK is at least half the DEF. Sometimes, Yami Yugi will use "Megamorph" (which acts like a universal Equip card, increasing a monster's ATK and DEF by 500) on Mystical Elf just so that he can attack... with 1300 ATK.
  • It's important to note that the AI in most Yu-Gi-Oh games varies from Cheap to downright stupid. When they're cheap, they're somehow able to see your hand and somehow draw the exact right card(s) to counter it...
    • Also, dueling the anime/manga characters, they can somehow see the defense of a face-down monster before it's flipped and will decide whether or not to attack it based on a stat it shouldn't know yet (of course, it'll sometimes wait a turn, summon another monster and then attack with the same weak monster they hesitated with anyway).
    • Another thing the AI will do, which can be called the "fake out dance" is to know a monster's high defense before it's flipped, but keep summoning monsters too weak to destroy it and apparently fake it out. Not too horrible, until they'll do this even if you have stronger offense monsters out. And they'll keep doing this until they lose.
  • There's also its inability to judge the worth of cards in its hands, meaning that it discards randomly whenever an effect makes them do so, which can often make them cripple their entire strategy by eliminating their most important card.
    • To wit: The AI has three cards, which consist of a weak monster, a strong monster whose level is too high to be summoned, and a spell which makes the user discard a card but would let him summon the stronger monster. The AI will, 50% of the time, activate the spell, discard the stronger monster, and then summon the weaker monster which wouldn't need the spell in the first place.
    • However, it's averted in later games, where the smarter computers will only throw out a strong card if they have something to revive it. If they have this strategy, they will use it.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh 5D's Duel Transer/Master of the Cards is also not immune. The AI Computer opponent you have unlocked initially has a few decks that are easy to overcome, but for some reason it likes to set off a combo of Waboku and Hallowed Life Barrier. I'll break it down: Waboku stops you taking damage that turn and stops your monsters from being killed, Hallowed Life Barrier is basically the same, except you need to discard a card to activate it, and all it does is nullify battle and effect damage, not protect monsters. I can see why it can help to prevent taking effect damage, but it's still a pretty stupid combination.
  • The AI is incapable of deciding whether or not using particular traps is a good idea or not. If your opponent has Torrential Tribute set (a trap which wipes all monsters on the field when activated), they'll use it even if the monster they already have on the field is stronger than the one you just summoned (of course if you're doing this, they might foresee your equipping it with something). Then again, they'll often wipe the whole field even if they have a much stronger monster out. Opponents using Torrential Tribute to destroy the whole field when they have a 2500+ ATK ritual monster out when all you did was summon a relatively weak monster is common enough to count as a strategy to get rid of their monsters.
  • Despite being the main character, Yugi will often make the baffling decision to keep summoning Sinister Serpent, an effect monster with 300 ATK and 250 DEF. It's effect is to keep showing up in his hand if it's destroyed. Good if you plan on sacrificing it, but he never does this. He keeps it out until you vaporize it with a much stronger monster, and then keep summoning it just because.
  • Total Defence Shogun is particularly weak in the hands of the AI. It has 1550 ATK, 2500 DEF, and it can attack while in defence mode. Whenever they play/use/control one however, they will always switch it to attack mode. So, basically, the AI weakens the monster by 950 points, AND opens themselves up to Life Point damage voluntarilly.
  • The AI will sometimes use Premature Burial or Call of the Haunted to summon Gearfried the Iron Knight. For those who are unaware, either of those cards can be used to summon a monster from the Graveyard, but the card is then equipped to the monster; if the card is destroyed, so is the monster it summoned. Gearfried destroys any card that is equipped to it automatically. Yeah...
    • Even more humorous because Premature Burial costs 800 life points to use.
  • The AI has also been known to do things like take control of your monster using a card like Change Of Heart, which takes yours for one turn, but then boost its stats with a permanent equip spell. So at the end of your turn, you get your monster back, only the AI has actually helped you.
  • There's a similar problem with the 1997 Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers. Sometimes, the computer can come up with masterful combos and expert tactical plans. Other times: they sacrifice their last point of life to Pestilence in order to kill some Llanowar Elves, and summoning a Lord of the Pit and then doing nothing with it, meaning it eats all the computer's monsters and starts on the computer's life total. In particular, it will only attack if the creature is guaranteed to survive the creatures you have out or it has enough monsters to zerg you to death. This means that it doesn't, for example, fling expendable creatures at you to whittle down your forces, even if those creatures have a significant upkeep like sacrificing a creature.
  • In Yugioh: Dungeon Dice Monsters, any character not found in the anime will just summon around their Heart Points and will eventually use up all their summons. They will then be unable to do anything, allowing you to have a many rolls as you need to summon anything. The Exodia pieces can be summoned this way, and by summoning then all, you get an instant win, and the AI is powerless to stop you.
    • You can beat anyone in the game with an equally inane strategy. There are summonable "items" in the game which take the form of chests. Only the summoner knows what's in the chest, and it activates when a monster passes over it. The AI will never run over your chests, in the expectation that it might be a trap (and, to be fair, it might). However, it is possible, by spamming cheap summons, to block your opponent so that the only path to your heart points is through the chest. At which point, the AI will helpfully sit around, waiting for you to kill them.
• The final boss of Magic: The Gathering: Battlegrounds has the ability to cast any spell in the game, any time he likes. Theoretically this means he should be able to spam you with giant monsters while countering any spell that you try to cast. Instead, he just sort of hangs around not doing much, and can be trapped in a loop by summoning the same low-level Mook over and over again. Possibly intentional on the part of the developers, since if the boss used his powers in a sensible fashion then he would be completely unbeatable.
• This has plagued computerised Go engines (especially when compared with computerised Chess engines), with them being trounced by professional Go players even when given 25 stone advantages... The latest Go AI can win with a 9 stone advantage, and has been stated that it's up to good amateur levels.
  • In Go the problem space is much larger. While both go and chess have a finite number of moves per turn, determining the possible moves in chess is a matter of thinking of each piece and seeing where they can land and if it's open, whereas in go it's not a matter of "which of these 32 pieces can move where?" so much as "which of these 300-odd spots should pieces go on?", which doesn't just make calculation slower and more memory intensive, but also makes the heuristics harder to work on, too.
• A classic computer game that has gone by many names over the years relies on this trope. In the original version, you had to run from robots, although modern versions have used zombies, vampires, Eldritch Abominations... basically, whatever. Anyway, you and the robots both move one square per turn (like a chess king), and robots will chase you down. You have no weapon, but the robots will attack and annihilate each other before they ever turn on you! Thus, you have to rely on robots' tendency to kill each other before they kill you.
  • It's even been done with Daleks.
• The Windows program Mission Maker has extremely primitive AI. Make a character 'Seek and Destroy' the player, then get another character between them. The hostile character, instead of moving around, will kill the other character to get to the player.
• The classic arcade game Berzerk allows you to make enemies crash into each other to kill each other. Or if you're lucky and clever, into the edges of walls.
• Exploiting the Artificial Stupidity of the guards in Lode Runner is very useful, with some levels relying on it. For instance, you can position yourself on a ladder so they climb upwards when you're directly below them.
• Golden Axe. Good game, comically bad AI. Enemies will often suicide themselves without your "help". The most effective way to beat Duel is to get 2 enemies on opposite ends of the screen and keep fly kicking off them, like a pendulum swinging left and right. Mario enemies are smarter than this.
• In Splinter Cell Conviction, at one point you are confronted with an enemy helicopter gunship. It always shoots in front of Sam and never thinks to try and flank him.
• The usual method to beat the last boss in Guitar Hero III invokes this. Basically, there's a certain point where a Whammy attack will kill him in one hit. Why is this? In that particular section, instead of using the whammy bar to recover, he just hammers the STRUM BAR until he kills himself. One critical flaw in an otherwise complete bastard.
• Computer controlled helpers in Kirby Super Star have their uses, but don't expect them to live very long. Fortunately they're easy to replace.
  • Similarly, your AI allies in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror can be counted on for jack squat. They'll mill around in random areas, getting random abilities (including abilities not in their current area), and if you call them to your side...well, it's usually for one of three reasons: a boss fight, the fact that they bring health-restoring food with them, or one of them somehow snagged the Smash ability and you're just waiting for them to screw up so you can use it yourself.
• If you've ever played a video game adaptation of a game show, you've probably encountered computer contestants that couldn't answer simple questions correctly. Press Your Luck for the Wii is one of the Egregious examples, with computer opponents answering questions such as "What animal do we get milk from?", "What is 36 divided by 6?", or "How many months are in a year?" wrong.
  • Old versions of Jeopardy! for PC in the early 1990's had the AI contestants buzz in and answer in complete gibberish. The answer pool was so small that pulling a wrong answer from that could clue the player in another time.
    • The above is true for the NES versions as well (save for Super Jeopardy!). However, the gibberish is the exact same length as the correct response, and often shows some letters in the response as well. For example, if a correct response is TV Tropes, the AI would show something like *V@r#pes.
• Demigod, a Defence of the Ancients type game tends to inflict this on players when they go against the bots on higher difficulty levels. The opposing team will specialise in hit-and-run tactics, prioritise game-changers like Reinforcement Flags, and just generally give you a run for your money. Your allies, on the other hand, will position themselves directly between two enemy gun posts and pick on irrelevant minions, while being whaled on by the enemy, thus feeding your opponents both gold and experience. Since your opponents are now relatively stronger, and can afford to upgrade their defensive structures, this process becomes streamlined, resulting in ally deaths roughly every few minutes.
• Star FOX series has wingmen's "calling for a help" as a fixed pattern in every side scrolling stages. They can't help themselves and will go down if you don't help them. All Range Mode, however, turns their stupidity up to eleven.
  • One particularly notable example of how bad the wingmen's AI is in All Range Mode is in the Star Wolf dogfights in Star Fox 64. Each Star Wolf pilot is programmed to target a specific member of your squadron. Each wingman will constantly plead for you to help him by shooting down the Star Wolf member who's on his tail. Once you do, he will blissfully fly around in a circle minding his own business and make no effort to help you as the remaining Star Wolf members continue to rip you and your other wingmen to shreds.
  • To be fair on that one, your wingmen destroying one of the Star Wolf pilots would screw you out of fair chunk of points, since things they destroy aren't counted toward the point total. Why they couldn't just let the things they do count isn't totally clear, but it's still better to have them do nothing than do something that hurts you.
• The buses in The Simpsons Road Rage constantly crash into anything in sight without any provoking them, typically you.
• Wheatley, also known as the Intelligence Dampening Sphere in Portal 2 is a deliberate In-Universe example, described by GLaDOS as "the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived", and "the moron they built to make me an idiot".
• Pokemon Card GB2 acts stupid in a lot of ways:
  • The AI will use cards such as Professor Oak and Bill a lot, and nearly always use attacks and other stuff to just draw more cards. And then run out of cards and they complain of losing...
  • They tend to play better at attack than defense and nearly always choose to attack even when it is not beneficial to do so (probably in a misguided attempt to pick up more side cards and win the game faster). Including the use of Defender at times when it actually helps his opponent.
  • Also using Gust of Wind to cheaply knock out your cards, which is usually a waste and just gives you a free switch (although occasionally this is the correct play with Gust of Wind, it usually isn't), rather than us
  • They also seem to completely disregard your ability to damage their bench pokemon cards, or the possibility that their resistance to your cards might actually help you (which, if you can damage their bench pokemon cards, can happen a lot).
  • There is other dumb stuff too which is difficult to know why it even comes up with such things, as damage swapping to one of their bench pokemon cards the same as their active one and then retreating to that damaged benched one, and then doing the same on the next turn...what???

Real Life

• In the first annual Loebner Prize contest to find the most humanlike chatbot, the winner won in part because it could imitate human typing errors. One runner-up also got its high score by pretending to be a paranoid autistic seven-year-old. The Economist's use of the term "artificial stupidity" to describe the winner's technique may be the Trope Namer.
• Sometimes, it only takes a small bit of pushing to get an otherwise sane and normal IRC chatbot to go get itself killed. Repeatedly. By the same action. Bonus points for the bot in question acknowledging the action.
• In Epic Games's documentation of the Unreal Development Kit's AI, they state that, in their games, (the Unreal series and Gears of War) they have to balance artificial stupidity and artificial intelligence to make their bots feel human; too much intelligence and it's obvious you're playing against a flawless machine ("Perfect aim is easy, but missing like a human player is hard."), too much stupidity, even if it would be realistic for a human player, and people think the AI is just dumb. They said that, during the playtesting for Unreal Tournament III, one of their designers complained about how poorly the AI was faring on a particular map, not realising he'd been facing humans.
• Played for Laughs by the annual Baca Robo Contest that in 2010 took place in Budapest. The goal for the participants is to create the most ridiculous robotic creation possible, and the one that gets the most laughs from the audience wins a €2,000 prize. Of course, here the Artificial Stupidity is quite intentional.
• Norton Antivirus. Which, according to the Idiot Programming page, has been known to classify itself as a virus. Hilarity, and digital suicide, ensues.
• Probably the worst Epic Fail in the history of computer chess occurred in the game played by COKO III against GENIE in the 1971 ACM North American Computer Chess Championship. COKO had captured all the Black pieces, trapped the Black king and was all set to checkmate. But COKO overlooked mate in one for seven moves in a row, instead shuffling the White king back and forth. GENIE's response to this indecisiveness was to push its Black pawns until one became a queen, which it exchanged for all the White pieces and a couple of pawns. By the time Black was about to queen another pawn, COKO's programmers resigned.
• The Grammar checker in Microsoft Word is always drawing green lines under your sentences, but the suggestions it makes (if any) to resolve the problem almost never make any kind of sense in context or scan in a way that would sound right to a native English speaker. And then there's Clippy... Oh Clippy...
  • Most of the time, the grammar error given is "Fragment (consider revising)", which doesn't really explain much (it basically means that the sentence isn't a complete one, but it's very picky about what it considers a complete sentence). As for Clippy, the sentence "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like some help?" is almost memetic in how much anyone trying to write anything in Word will get irritated upon seeing it. Thankfully you can disable the Office Assistant (of which Clippy is one of many), which many people do, to the point that later editions of Microsoft Word no longer included them.
  • On occasions, the grammar checker will identify a sentence as a grammar error, then after correcting, identify the corrected sentence as a grammar error.
• Non-electronic example! The Amazing Dr Nim is basically a marble track with a number of gates which can either allow marbles to pass or block them. This allows it to play a perfect game of Nim. In order for it to be beatable, it includes an 'equaliser' gate. When set to on, this causes it to make a single non-optimal play over the course of the game, allowing a perfect human player to win an otherwise unwinnable game.