I've always been fascinated by how we create AI, and the illusion of intelligence in games. We had another discussion about AI at http://videogames.videosift.com/talk/Intelligent-Design-Where-is-AI-going which ended up in a discussion about the viability of Strong AI.
The following article talks about how you actually make a game seem like it's behaving intelligently, which like graphics rendering is based on a bunch of tricks and magic to make us believe it.
http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2009/03/05/how-ai-in-games-works/1
Introduction quoted:
"You probably don’t think that the average rabbit is particularly intelligent. They generally like eating grass, hopping around and digging holes. How complicated could such a small animal be?
Well, in early 2008, IBM embarked on a project to digitally simulate the cerebral cortex of such a small mammal at the Thomas J Watson Research Center. The test used 8,192 processors and 2.8TB of memory on the Blue Gene-L supercomputer to simulate the 22 million neurons and 11 billion synapses found in the16cm2 cortical surface of a rabbit’s brain.
Simulating even primitive intelligence is extremely demanding, so how does a basic PC go about simulating human intelligence in multiple game characters at once?
Gaming AI is in many ways similar to 3D graphics rasterisation, which uses complex trickery such as shaders and textures to give the impression of real light and shadow. If you were to properly ray trace a 3D scene in a game, as you would in a CGI movie, it would take considerably more processing power, and the same applies to AI."
The following article talks about how you actually make a game seem like it's behaving intelligently, which like graphics rendering is based on a bunch of tricks and magic to make us believe it.
http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2009/03/05/how-ai-in-games-works/1
Introduction quoted:
"You probably don’t think that the average rabbit is particularly intelligent. They generally like eating grass, hopping around and digging holes. How complicated could such a small animal be?
Well, in early 2008, IBM embarked on a project to digitally simulate the cerebral cortex of such a small mammal at the Thomas J Watson Research Center. The test used 8,192 processors and 2.8TB of memory on the Blue Gene-L supercomputer to simulate the 22 million neurons and 11 billion synapses found in the16cm2 cortical surface of a rabbit’s brain.
Simulating even primitive intelligence is extremely demanding, so how does a basic PC go about simulating human intelligence in multiple game characters at once?
Gaming AI is in many ways similar to 3D graphics rasterisation, which uses complex trickery such as shaders and textures to give the impression of real light and shadow. If you were to properly ray trace a 3D scene in a game, as you would in a CGI movie, it would take considerably more processing power, and the same applies to AI."
