Hi everone. This is my first post so go easy! I''m doing a project proposal for my MSc AI course. I''m interested in Artificial Societies (some of you may be familiar with the Sugarscape model). This is a lousy description, but the field involves creating models of interacting agents with simple rules and observing the behaviour that emerges from the non-linear interactions. Such behaviours include trade, migration and anything you can think of really. That''s interesting enough in itself (if I say so myself) but I''m interested in merging this field with games. The idea was sparked by reading some time ago about the upcoming Republic game (which involvces politics, corruption etc.). I may have interpreted this wrong (and I''m not sure how much is scripted or not) but it looks like each of the NPCs is an agent with its own beliefs, and each one can be ''manipulated'' by the player. As there are thousands of NPCs, in order to sway the population, the player must manipulate the right NPCs in order to try to create the appropriate effects that will propogate throughout the population. I could be reading to much into this game, but that is (part of) my vision. I''m really here to ask for help in finding articles and papers on this subject. I need to find at least one that refers to my subject, and I only have just over 24hrs to submit! Sorry for rambling. Richie

You may have already read this - but this is by Alex Whittaker who is the AI programmer on Republic.

USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN PC GAMES by Alex Whittaker


I also have a .pdf by Alex Whittaker called "Love Thine Agent: Implementing believable agents using augmented transition networks"
But I can''t find a link to it right now.
I will upload it to my site in the evening and post the link here.



gpdev.net - 3D Graphics & Artificial Intelligence

If you''re interested in the Alex Whittaker paper - you can download it from the following link.

Love Thine Agent: Implementing believable agents using augmented transition networks

Thanks for the links gpdev. 8^)

Cheers,

Timkin