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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."
AI is a euphemism for "behavior." When I hear people complaining about how games aren't using the latest in AI research, I want to respond "that's because games don't really use AI" at least not what people think of as AI. AI in a typical game is just a list of weighted rules, such as "if the player has a more powerful weapon than character X, make character X run away." When you have lots of such rules and you twiddle with them a lot, then you get so-called AI.
Putting in random factors makes things much harder to pin down. Maybe when a character spots you, there will be a 50% "run or attack" decision. If the decision to run, then you think "Ha, ha, ha, he's running scared!" If the decision is to attack, and he gets you, then you think "Wow, that guy was good." If he attacks and you get him, then you feel like you're doing well.
To a great extent AI is psychological. You read into things what you want.
Some time after getting Unreal Tournament 2003, I set out to appraise its AI. I decided to set up a game in which it couldn't cheat; I made a one-on-one game, on the map DM-Gael (a small, open map, so while the bot may always know the player's location, also vise versa), and with rocket launchers only (so that the bot couldn't do some simple trig to always hit). I set the bot to its highest difficulty, and played.
The bot had some notable weaknesses (it kept getting killed going for the powerup in the center, or while coming up a lift, and never seemed to learn from these mistakes), but did fairly well overall. In the end I won with a substantial, but not overwhelming, margin.
So, I said, the AI had failed the test: given a fair match, on its most difficult settings, it lost. But then I realized, I had a lot of fun administering it. Then I realized that the point of an AI isn't to beat the player, but to be fun to play against; whether it wins or loses really doesn't matter.