Game AI vs Traditional AI

I have an academic and professional background in traditional AI, and I've programmed an AI for a 3D video game I made in college. My traditional AI background is mostly in applying a wide variety of mainstream machine learning algorithms, including neural networks, SVMs, and regression, to real world problems like fraud and image detection. I was somewhat frustrated when building the game AI because the best solution came down to building a large state machine with hard-coded logic. The AI was dead-simple, but it worked well and wasn't too far from state of the art in video game AIs at the time, and I suspect today.

I agree with the general point of this article; in fact, I think it understates the case. When people want AI in video games they want the AI to be truly smart. The fact is, we haven't cracked "intelligence" yet. Most of 'AI' research has veered into machine learning, which is basically applied statistics. While this algorithms can solve many constrained problems quite well (this field powers much of google search) it's tough to frame complex problems like a 3D FPS AI, into a simple statistical framework. Even biologically-inspired AIs like neural networks are designed to solve highly constrained problems. In short, I don't think it's possible to even design a non-bruteforce AI, regardless of computational power, with what we currently know.

It's a lot more important for AI for game characters to look real than to be real. It's easy to forget that the characters are there to support the fun of the game, and not to be fun to write or support the ego of the author. Incidentally, I thought the article was worth it for the mention of Infinite Mario and Galactic Arms Race alone-- I had not heard of those projects before.

You might want to check out the "AI Game Programming Wisdom" series. I think at this point, there are four of them. "Game Programming Gems" is another series worth checking out (I think there are 8 at this point); each book normally has a section on game AI.

The books are a series of articles written by industry practitioners solving a problem they have run across. Normally the articles contain inline code, and the books come with a CD with executable examples and code to accompany the articles.

You might enjoy a talk by the designer of much Civilization AI:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI

Its a very good talk, but applied video game AI as a field is kind of a let down.

I hear you. I have a similar background like yours and I had a huge disappointment when I broke into the game industry 2 years ago. But I am not agree with you in the sense that an statistic approach is not possible. There are so many opportunities but the reality is that game designers don't want that to happen.

The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the behaviour of the game, and I believe they don't even want to understand how a machine learning AI can be possible. I even discussed my master thesis (an SVM based controller for enemies) with a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that "people" wouldn't care about a better AI (after that he just turned out and walked away)

I am still optimist that eventually that would happen. But I don't have enough patience to fight against that any more. So hopefully a young hacker reading this would change that :)