


The game is usually supposed to provide entertainment and challenge rather than be ‘optimal’ - so even if the agents could be trained to take the best approach against the humans, this is often not what the designers actually want.It isn’t usually ‘pre-trained’ like a machine learning algorithm would be it’s not practical to write a neural network during development to observe tens of thousands of players and learn the best way to play against them, because the game isn’t released yet and there are no players!.Constraints of Game AI developmentĪI for games usually has a few constraints it has to respect:

So the ‘sense’ part of the cycle is often much simpler, and the complexity arises in the ‘think’ and ‘act’ implementations. There’s no need to run image recognition algorithms to spot if there’s an enemy ahead the game knows there is an enemy there and can feed that information directly in to the decision making process. Games are unusual in that they don’t tend to need a complex system to extract this information, as much of it is intrinsic to the simulation. These are referred to as ‘ classification problems’. This is usually done by some sort of machine learning, which is especially good at taking a lot of noisy, real-world data (like a photo of the road in front of a car, or a few frames of video) and making some sense of that, extracting semantic information such as “there is another car 20 yards ahead of you”. For example, autonomous cars must take images of the road ahead, combine them with other data such as radar and LIDAR, and attempt to interpret what they see. In real-world AI problems, especially the ones making the news at the moment, they are typically heavily focused on the ‘sense’ part of this cycle.

the situation has now changed, due to the actions of the characters, so the cycle must repeat with the new data. starts moving along a path towards the enemy, or towards the item, etc)
