Artificial Stupidity

<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:

Sub-Pages

Miscellaneous Games

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.