Did Bots in Quake 3 "Learn" Pacifism?

Anon supposedly recreated the ending of Wargames

No. A 4chan post has been circulating the Internet recently, claiming that after four years on a server full of bots in a Quake 3 death match game, the bots learned that the best strategy was not to kill each other. Huffington Post jumped on the story, although they later updated the page admitting the story was a hoax. However, they did not explain why the story was fake. A major news outlet jumping on an anonymous 4chan copypasta should be a reflection of the current state of news today. 

The original 4chan thread. Click for large.

A whole thesis was published by ID Software in 2001 detailing the build and intricacies of the bots. Furthermore, in 2005 the Quake 3 source code was released under the GNU license, meaning anyone with a compiler could dig through the code. This should give us the tools necessary to scrutinize these claims.
Let us first take a look first at the original post:

"Quake 3 bots were designed off an artificial neural network.
They would effectively "think" to figure out the best way to do things. 
They would see which tactics worked and which didn't.
The longer they played the more they would learn about you, figuring out your patterns, and this would apply to other bots aswell. For all intents and purposes they were one of the first learning AI in a game.

When I found out that I set up a Quake 3 arena server on my pirating server just to have 16 bots over and over just to see how good they would get. 
I set the server up 4 years ago, it's been running the entire time, I forgot about it until this thread. I'm gonna go check on them."

From page 13 of the thesis on Quake AI:

Although neural networks can be useful in several areas in bot AI they are not used for the Quake III Arena bot.

John Carmack even tweeted a response to the claims being made:

The bots are programmed to react to players given reaction time and accuracy constraints given the particular map. The bots DO have an internal representation of the each map given the "volume" of the map. They are not self learning, and they do not aggregate information for use later. "Learning" might not even be an appropriate context for what the bots do. Instead, having your bots standing around is much more consistent with having a bug in the code. For example, the files could have reached a max size limit, and just stopped.

If each of his bot logs are 256 megs each, and there are 16 bots, loading 8 gigs of ram on a 32-bit computer game is implausible in the first place. Even if this guy had over 8 gigs or ram in his computer, he simply could not load all of that bot data in the first place. While the data could be loaded as needed into the rom, the thesis specifically states that not being able to load such specific data in a fast paced game was a limitation of the game, and why a neural network could not be used. Once again, from page 13 of the thesis:

It is also possible to train a neural network during gameplay, which allows the bot to acquire all kinds of knowledge. However training of a neural network is often a time consuming process. The learning capabilities of the neural network will often have to be limited due to the time constraints in a real-time application like a game.

Finally there are other aspects of the story that are bizarre. Who has a server running for four years and forgets about it? During that time the game never crashed; the electricity never went out? No screenshots or video of this situation exists? The particular conditions should be replicable, and could possibly take much less time than4 years to replicate. I am not saying that such a situation of pacifism is implausible, but this story is clearly a hoax.

Quake has almost always been predominantly a multi-player game, with AI rarely being a focus in lieu of graphics, networking, and game-play elements. The bots could still do some pretty impressive things however. They were able to parse per-determined chat sentences given certain environmental characteristics (p.57).

ex. 1

if

environmental change

then

if

bot wants to

chat

then

choose initial chat

use random strings in chat message

replace synonyms in chat message to add variation

output chat message

endif

endif

 

 ex. 2

if

bot receives a message

then

replace synonyms in the message

interpret message using match templates

if

match is found

then

perform action

else

if

messages is a chat message from another player

then

if

bot wants

to reply to this message

then

find a reply chat

use random strings in chat message

replace synonyms in chat message to add variation

output chat message

endif

endif

endif

endif

As mentioned before, the bots DO react to players given reaction time and accuracy constraints and traverse "nodes" in relation to the current map. In this way, the bots do "think", but they do not "learn". AI programming is still being developed interdependently for contemporary first person shooters, and none of them have replicated anything like this. It is not to say that something like this could never happen. But one should keep in mind the disclaimer pasted across the top of some 4chan boards. "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."