The fundamental goal of a game AI system is to make the non player characters appear smart. Well, that may be over reaching a touch; making the non player characters appear not stupid is a high enough bar for my AI ambitions on this project. The problem is that it is very difficult to make an AI that can compete in a wide array of situations with even the most developmentally handicapped elementary school student.

There are a few impressive applications of AI concepts that have been developed but they all apply only to a very specific, or a set of very specific situations, and usually they have a lot of help. By a lot of help, I mean, autonomous vehicle systems that work splendidly as long as they are given gps waypoints every couple meters or warehouse management robots that read barcodes off the floor to determine where they are and are fed the locations of every other robot in the warehouse so they don’t collide. I certainly don’t mean to demean either of the two systems that I mention, but to my childhood-sci-fi idea of artificial intelligence, they seem like cheating. They would also fail to follow instructions that our hypothetical kindergartener could perform with ease, such as: “walk to school,” or “find all the red things in the warehouse.”

Well, if those seem like cheating, game AI will seem like reading the answer out of the back of the book. Or, in the case of my Pathfinding AI system, precalculating every answer, then just looking up the one that we need this time. (more…)