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The State of Game AI
Gamasutra has a summary written by Dan Kline of Crystal Dynamics for this year's Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) Conference held at Stanford University. They discussed why AI capabilities have not scaled with CPU speed, balancing MMO economies and game mechanics, procedural dialogue, and many other topics. Kline also wrote in more detail about the conference at his blog.
"... Rabin put forth his own challenge for the future: Despite all this, why is AI still allowed to suck? Because, in his view, sharp AI is just not required for many games, and game designers frequently don't get what AI can do. That was his challenge for this AIIDE — to show others the potential, and necessity, of game AI, to find the problems that designers are trying to tackle, and solve them."
Do we really want and AI that could hunt us down like dogs and kill us? We secretly like out AI to be dumb as a bag of rocks. Most games with "good" AI simply give the NPC a pre-programmed knowledge of the terrain, perfect accuracy, or the ability to soak up damage. If I were to make all things equal, I would give a game AI the same visual range, weapons, accuracy, and resistances as the player and then we'd see how smart it really is.