Diary of a Programmer

Posted by:  at 08:25 AM 

IGN has released another Dev Diary, this time with Marc Atkin, AI Programmer for Irrational Games. His main focus of the article is about how the focus creating AI is not to make them incredibly smart, but rather, just not have them do anything really stupid. His first paragraph summarizes his whole idea of how AI should and shouldn't be:

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) - the art of making computer controlled characters look smart. In games, though, the goal isn't so much to give them human-like intelligence (which is one of the Holy Grails of computer science research and is what mad scientists are currently working on in their labs around the world), but to make them entertaining to play with and against (which is still "difficult", but certainly more doable). It's just that when a computer opponent does something really dumb, like just standing motionless while taking damage, it immediately breaks the game's immersiveness. You the player are reminded that it's all just computer game.

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