Way back at the end of the last century we were all led to believe that wonderful ass-kicking AI would be standard issue in every computer game, office application and multibillion dollar DoD wargame. When we were writing these games in the 1980s and ’90s we were still dealing with limitations on available RAM and storage space (games shipped and ran on 3.5″ disks; early hard drives were awfully small). Still, what we did back in the ‘old days’ of computer games was, frankly, at least as good as what is shipping today.
I’ve written a lot of computer games and I’ve played even more. I would be very hard pressed to name a current game that has ‘pretty good’ AI. Based on the reviews I’ve read of most computer games, I’m not alone. AI, even just ‘acceptable’ AI, continues to be the biggest problem facing commercial computer games today.
On the ‘professional’ side large, expensive wargames (and here I can’t get into many details if I ever want to work in the industry again) had no AI whatsoever until fairly recently. For now, I’ll just say the results aren’t commensurate with the truck-loads of money that are being dumped on the problem.
My old friend, Mike Morton, urged me to start writing a blog about AI and this is the result. If there are any complaints about the blog, please write to me and I will send you Mike’s email address. He works for Google and probably has plenty of time to answer email.