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It’s been a great week for learning about Artificial Intelligence and the many aspects that go into it thanks to our friends at Three Speech.

So far we have discussed Autonomy, Perception, Appearance and Deception, and Navigation. The last and final topic of the week is Unpredictability and it’s many uses in Intelligent Design.

You might be wondering, how can you program instructions to make an NPC be spontaneous and not follow an obvious path? Well read on to find the answer.

There really is no perfect solution. Making something unpredictable is quite the tricky task. After all, you don’t want your enemies to always be following the same routine, that would be boring. Then again, you don’t want them to always be doing random actions that make no sense. You want to be able to watch their moves, learning from them in order to overcome your enemies. Programmers must find a middle ground on which to work with.

Over the years, techniques to AI have evolved and a classical approach to the subject is being applied to games. These techniques involving symbols are turning out to be more resourceful than Modern AI with its neural networks and genetic algorithms…at least for the current time being.It all comes down to what will give the player the most enjoyable experience as well as what type of game you are designing.

A big thanks goes out to Three Speech and the members of the gaming community they were able to talk to for putting together this discussion. We’ve had quite an exhilaration week talking about Artificial Intelligence and all the hard work developers do in order to achieve what we consider acceptable to gaming.

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