AI Programmer’s Bookshelf
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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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 :/