A Look At Modern Game AI

IEEE Spectrum is running a feature about the progress of game AI, and how it's helping to drive AI development in general. They explore several of the current avenues of research and look at potential solutions to some of the common problems. "The trade-off between blind searching and employing specialized knowledge is a central topic in AI research. In video games, searching can be problematic because there are often vast sets of possible game states to consider and not much time and memory available to make the required calculations. One way to get around these hurdles is to work not on the actual game at hand but on a much-simplified version. Abstractions of this kind often make it practical to search far ahead through the many possible game states while assessing each of them according to some straightforward formula. If that can be done, a computer-operated character will appear as intelligent as a chess-playing program--although the bot's seemingly deft actions will, in fact, be guided by simple brute-force calculations."

Comments

Re:AI? In video games?

[acidrainx]

I have to say that the AI in Far Cry 2 is definitely one of the worst of current generation video games. I couldn't play that game for more than a couple days before getting utterly bored and frustrated at the idiotic AI.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, on the other hand, has some of the best AI I've seen AND its a multiplayer game. The bots' ability to attack and defend objectives while using infantry and vehicle skills against the random actions of human players is incredible.