Game AI Pro

I am just an NPC until I get coffee.<p>For AI researcher Game AI is like porn. It&#x27;s cheap tricks and obviously fake but oddly fascinating. Sometimes you find a new trick you want to try in real life.<p>Marvin Minsky once said &quot;I bet the human brain is a kludge.&quot; If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Combining many tricks together can create illusion of generality that is very convincing.

What a generous gift :)<p>And even though they gave a talk about in in 2015, their &quot;Simplest AI Trick in the Book&quot; is still not implemented by some games released nowadays.<p>In case you don&#x27;t know it, it&#x27;s:<p>0.2s reaction time for aiming<p>+ 0.4s reaction time for yes&#x2F;no decisions<p>+ additional delay for ambiguity, surprise, or limited visibility<p>I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. Just seeing your opponent taking a moment to think makes whatever it is they do so much more convincing.

Download it all with<p>wget -r -A.pdf <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gameaipro.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gameaipro.com&#x2F;</a><p>wget -r -A.zip <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gameaipro.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gameaipro.com&#x2F;</a>

Very cool. I always expect a link like this to either be some super basic examples (e.g. how to implement flocking) or articles detailing techniques used in games from ~20 years ago.<p>Very cool how recent and modern these are (along with super reputable authors)

Is this directly from the authors? If yes, I&#x27;m a bit shocked given the prices for the book when searching for ed 1, ed 2 and ed 3 on Google. Please add a donation button to the site.<p>I just finished the first four sections and I love it. Thanks a lot!

I&#x27;ve been thinking a lot about trying to make an AI for a turn based 4X game. I believe an AI that could defeat the strongest human players in (for example) Civilization would be more impressive than AlphaStar and the Dota AIs.<p>I think it might give the gaming industry a kick in the pants to start utilizing more advance AI techniques in general, since it seems almost all discussions of strong AI in games are dominated by apologists explaining why it&#x27;s not practical. Just one example of strong AI in a successful game would change the industry.<p>After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more interesting task of dumbing them down in fun ways.

What a cool and useful resource. Unfortunately, all of the pdf files are inaccessible to assistive technology (such as screen readers).

&gt; Unfortunately, the time between seeing a decision acted out and the actual act of making that decision can mean that all relevant information has already been discarded. Ideally if the entire game simu-lation could be rewound to the exact moment in time when the error occurred, it would make notoriously difficult problems to debug, trivial to understand why they occurred.<p>&gt; Game engines have typically made reproducing these types of problems easier using deterministic playback methods (Dickinson 2001), where the entire state of the game simu-lation can jump back in time and resimulate the same problem over and over (Llopis 2008).<p>Imagine if you could do this for <i>all</i> programming? [from chapter 6]

The RVO chapter, and that concept I general is an amazing one because they really created a method for 2 autonomous characters avoiding collisions on a natural way - with code that is easy to understand

Love these books. Two techniques I’ve found hugely valuable in practice are utility-based AI and flow field pathfinding&#x2F;goal seeking.

Shouldn&#x27;t it have (2017) in title?

Thank! Nice to see people releasing this kind of material for free!

Does anyone know the reason why they suddenly became free?

Thank you very much!

Yeah this is awesome