Artical: [Link]
Patent: [Link]
The supreme overlord of Windows operative systems, Microsoft, have filed a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where they propose cheat detection at platform level that is handled by artificial intelligence, or AI in short.
The founder of Blue ScreenTM is obviously laying the foundations for proper anti-cheat detection on their console, without having to rely on game developers. Unfortunately for humans, the amount of data required is much more than mere mortals could chew through.
Microsoft's main concern is that platforms that "host third-party games may not be able to detect cheating that occurs". As such, platforms can, and often do, reward cheating behaviour, simply on the grounds of not being aware of it.
Come in - machine learning. Microsoft proposes a compartmentalised model of AI anti-cheat detection, where the first module is called the goals management module. This is just your run of the mill achievements system, which establishes the general framework.
The second one is where the magic happens, as the cheating detection module would track your in-game progress and use machine learning to closely study your gaming patterns. Games would inform the module of gameplay information and player progress, letting the AI crunch the numbers.
As you can imagine, the amount of data involved is huge and would take an average human hours, perhaps even days to decipher. AI, on the other hand, can pull projections of your normal gameplay, data comparisons or just about anything else in mere seconds, which does make him the perfect candidate in Microsoft's plan.
If the AI finds discrepancies in these patterns, it flags the user as cheater and sends him to the "enforcement module", which may sounds a bit too Orwellian for our taste, but never mind. It's basically customer support, where only first offences will be managed by actual people. Repeat offenders, will be killed. Just kidding, they'll either be suspended or permanently banned.
Disregarding the paranoias of AI taking over the world, Microsoft may be onto something here. After all, statistical analyses are invaluable tools once properly used, although it'll probably be a while before we see this in commercial usage. I mean, the juice you'd need for these would probably reduce Xbox One to Xbox 360 in terms of power under the hood, so you may wanna put off building that anti-AI shelter. For now.