Well AI in general is something artificial that can learn. However, as a game developement term it has a different definition.

I suppose you could have an algorithms forum if you wanted AI and those type of things seperated.

Just a quick response to this:

Many people acknowledge that there is a difference between Game-AI and AI as the term is used in academia/research. In this forum we generally accept that when we say AI, we are referring to Game-AI as opposed to ''that other'' AI, simply because this is a game development forum.

How do we define Game-AI. Well, like ''real'' AI its boundaries are blurred. It basically covers all of the techniques that go into the creation of the computer opponent. Be that pathfinding or other search, planning & decision making, learning, etc. There is most definitely an overlap between this type of ''AI'' and AI as it is defined in the classic sense (which is actually not very well defined).

In academic and research fields, there are basically two camps to the ''what is AI'' debate. Camp (1): AI is about making something intelligent (comparable perhaps to a humans level of cognition). Camp (2): AI is about investigating how to (and whether it is possible to) achieve certain ''intelligent faculties'' (be they the sorts of things listed above, or other things like emotions) through the use of computational models. Hopefully camp (2) researchers can better help us understand what intelligence is so that we can better understand ourselves.

Game-AI falls in close to camp (1) with the stipulation that Game-AI designers/programmers only need to make their creation LOOK intelligent to succeed. Thankfully/unfortunately most human players can very quickly tell the difference between something that looks intelligent and something that IS intelligent!

I hope that has helped a little with your understanding of what AI is in the context of games and what real AI is!

(Yes I''m biased one way... can you pick which way?)

Timkin

It''s not that one way (Game-AI or AI) is more logical than the other. Each has it''s own application. Game-AI is specifically intended to fool a game player into thinking it is competing against, or working with, an intelligent agent. This illusion only lasts a short time in games. (There is an argument that this is a desirable effect that publishers seek so that games only have a short shelf life and the player is ready for the "next big thing" in the gaming community!)

AI for non-game applications (and here I am talking applications based research as opposed to purely investigative research) is generally about producing ''intelligent'' behaviours in agents, or cognitive outcomes that we would expect from another intelligent being; be that human, simian, cetacean, delphinidae, etc. Such agents are either required to interact with humans, other machines or simply survive in a particular environment while performing complex tasks.

My own bias is that game-AI should not really be called AI. I''m a purest, probably because my background is in academia and industry based AI research. As to what game-AI should be called? Perhaps just game programming... but I suspect that many people would consider that what they do is more than mere programming (unfortunately that is generally not the case)!

*Timkin puts on his fire resistant suit*



Cheers,

Timkin

Some people relatively recently have started referring to computer enemies as "the AI" or "an AI". I think this is a misleading use of the term, as such enemies may not contain anything that even comes close towards being intelligence. I think that the most accurate meaning of the term ''artificial intelligence'' would be to refer to the code that decides what these opponents does, but not to refer to the opponents themselves. Coming from the RPG side of gaming, I tend to call individual computer opponents NPCs (short for Non-Player Characters). I don''t think AI has to mean that it learns or traverses a search tree or uses predicate logic or any of the other reasonably advanced concepts to be called AI, but these are concepts that map quite closely onto representing something approximating intelligence on a computer and thus usually go hand-in-hand.

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