AI Programmer’s Bookshelf

Steve Grand's other book "Growing up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps" should also be included in this list.

https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Up-Lucy-Android-Twenty/dp/075...

Many of the books seem older than 10 years (also in the general exams list[1]). Are the (seemingly) vast advancements in the last years still based on the same principles? (Speaking as a complete ML noob.)

[1]: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin//generals/general_exams....

ML isn't really used in game programming. These books focus on more practical techniques such as State Machines, Pathfinding, Planning, Scripting etc.

This is about game AIs, which are definitely interesting. But for the most part they overlap very little with what most people think of as AI.

In undergrad (mid 2000s) I partially specialized in both computer graphics and machine learning, and took a video game class to try combining these skills. I have two big memories from this time that stuck with me. The first is the time a dev on Civilization 1 visited our class. He spoke about the "AI" of civilization, which he revealed to be a simple random number generator. He told us people often thought it was far more complex, but that's really all there was to it.

The second memory is when we actually built a 3d engine + game from scratch. Every week we had to add a new feature, so one week I obviously took on the AI. My partner and I were doing a soccer-style game, and I had grand visions of implementing a sophisticated AI using what I'd been learning in my other classes, like SVMs and neural networks. I started doing research, and was shocked to learn that no video games at the time did any of this. I learned that computers at the time weren't really capable of running several versions of an ML algorithm simultaneously (one per agent) while dealing with everything else - and more importantly that there was little need. I ended up spending a couple days building out a basic state machine, and it worked. Even the professor thought we added incredible intelligence to the players, who in reality were just following ~10 rules like "if player in defense mode: move towards the midpoint between the ball and the goal while keeping some distance between other players".

My main take-away from that class is that there was little need for actual AI in video games, and that I should pursue a different career path :/