Game Stooge

Artificial Intelligence, Last On The List of Design Bullets?

• Scribbled on April 23rd, 2007 by Derrick Schommer
• Filed in Industry News, Microsoft Xbox 360, PC, Sony PlayStation 3

When it comes to video game development, it seems graphics are the primary area development companies strive to achieve top-dog status. What about all the other game mechanics? Obviously User Interface is up in priority otherwise you’ll lose your fans and well…users.

Next we’ve got to have great game play, multi-player functionality, immersing sounds to make us feel like we’re in the thick of the action and a back-story to tie it all together. What about Artificial Intelligence, AI as it’s known in the industry?

Gamers that love multi-player action may not really care about AI because they’re interested in playing real humans. But there is this other big world of gaming called “single player” which seems to lack in one major area: making believable opponents.

“If a computer character doesn’t learn something for itself then the programmer must have told it what to do, and anything that does exactly what it’s told and nothing else is not intelligent. This is changing, and neural networks and other learning systems are beginning to creep in. But games programmers tend to devalue the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’.”

Why are we so lacking in AI functionality? Probably because it takes a special subset of developers that understand the concepts of AI before a solid design can be implemented. Just as we hire “network programmers” to implement a solid network model we’ve got to hire “AI programmer” to do proper artificial intelligent solutions.

What we hope to see, soon, are games that fully utilize the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for ground breaking experiments in truly well implemented AI design. Games like Fable 2 will be implementing true Neural Networks for their AI design - a system of learning not a system of pre-programmed responses.

Back in the day, utilizing processor time for AI was a last priority because processing power was so limited. Now we offload most of our graphics onto GPUs and physics are even the focus points for some new upcoming physics daughter boards. Now that we have covered Newtons Laws and harnessed the powers of graphical genius it’s time to look to the future: the future of intelligent thinking on the part of our enemies.

(Thanks, gamepro)