IEEE Spectrum Surveys Current Games' AI Technology

orac2 writes " IEEE Spectrum has an article on the AI technologies used in the current crop of video games. State machines, learning algorithms, cheating, smart terrain, etc are discussed. Game developers interviewed include Richard Evans, of Black and White fame, who talks about Lionhead's upcoming Dmitri project and Soren Johnson who created Civ III's AI."

Comments

Ultimate Page of Artificial Intelligence for Games

[ekrout]

The page located at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ai.html#search contains wonderful links about coding A.I. into your games, programs, etc.

MOD THIS UP #@ +5; Informative @#

[Anonymous Coward]

link

Re:I like it, but am unsure.

[KiahZero]

You think it's hard to play with a dial up connection? Try sattilite sometime (*dodge*, *dodge*, *fire*... 3 seconds pass... "Wow, I missed... imagine that!").

I'd really like to see a decent AI for games like Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights. The henchman have roughly the IQ of a very dumb dog. On more than one occasion, I've had a henchman walk directly into a fireball on the basis that an opponent was nearby. Mmm... toasty.

good book (mentioned in article)

[Xtifr]

I've just been reading Steve Rabin's book, AI Game Programming Wisdom, mentioned briefly in the article. I'm not a game programmer, but I am a programmer, and I've always been curious about game AIs. And I have to say that the book is very good, well worth it if you have any interest in the topic. It's actually a collection of articles written by a bunch of game AI programmers, collected and edited by Rabin. It covers a lot of ground, explains approaches that have worked and approaches that have failed, and why (in both cases). It contains both useful general principles and interesting examples of specific cases.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to a novice programmer, but for a moderately experienced programmer who's interested in practical game AI design, this book is well worth a look. The name says it all, this is a book written by the folks in the trenches, passing along their hard-earned wisdom. Very enjoyable.

Now I want to try my own hand at writing some game AI. Maybe I should poke around on sourceforge for games that need AI help. (Assuming I can weed my way past all the projects that have NO CODE AT ALL, which seems to be especially common with the games on sourceforge.)

Re:Ethics, IP, amd AI

[hawkestein]

C'mon, thought experiments are the stuff that philosophy is made of. You give me a scientific, measurable definition of conciousness and I'll lay off the thought experiments.

When it comes to building circuits that act like neurons, I'm not a neuromorphic engineer. But even today people are building circuits that can interface with neurons (look at the guys at Cal Tech, for example). There was that guy in Britian (can't remember his name, references somebody?) who was doing experiments with re-routing electrical signals from his arm to his computer and back to his arm to see if the computer could reproduce the signal adequately to control the muscle (this was the same guy who walked around with implants that tracked where he was around the school).

If it makes you feel better you can skip the step about "synthetic" neurons and go right to the step where you've got a little computer that simulates the neurons and can interface with them.

As for simulating the brain exactly: first of all, there isn't much evidence that there is any quantum effects in the behavior of a neuron (people don't seem to take Roger Penrose too seriously in this area). Second of all, even if there are quantum effects and there was some randomness to the simulation, so what? Just because there are quantum effects, doesn't mean you can't simulate them. You aren't trying to *predict* what someone else's brain is going to do, you just want a simulation that follows the same laws. You just have to add some randomness to your experiment.

What makes a neuron a neuron is that it is, well, a neuron.

Can't argue with you there. :)