PUBLIC MARKS with tags www.ai-blog.net & 2006

In the comments thread on Greg's welcome post back last September, we had a bit of a chat about achieving real-world crowd densities on next-gen platforms. If you haven't yet seen Capcom's Dead Rising, it's worth checking out the new official trailer released last Friday - I count possibly 100+ NPCs on screen in dense urban environments, with no apparent interpenetrations and quite a bit of animation going on.

However though AI Planning has much to contribute to both these fields, particularly in producing more convincing Non-Player Characters and autonomous intelligent characters, few AI planning researchers have been involved in this work, and the technology, where applied at all, has often been used in a somewhat ad hoc way. In addition, games company use of AI planning has so far been limited - A*-based motion planning the main exception - with practitioners feeling that the technology is too computationally expensive or risky for integration into computer games.

Gamespot's Best AI of 2005

Starting on a full time AI job "in the industry" has been an interesting experience. My new secret project is very cool, and the AI is a lot of fun, but I had been very surprised by the sheer amount of engineering details that go into a game. All the stuff that you can just ignore when doing research - well, it all comes back, with a vengeance. :)

This article introduces hidden Markov models, an inexpensive and intuitive method for modeling stochastic processes.