Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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Why Behavioral
Mathematics?
Game artificial intelligence (AI) has been an expanding and changing term in
the past five to ten years. Even today, if you ask people what “game AI� en-
tails, you will get significantly different answers. For a long time, however,
most of those answers could be tied to specific and simple functions.
“It's what makes the character walk toward me.�
“It's what makes the enemy shoot at me.�
“It's what makes the animation change from 'idle' to 'attack.'�
Those are all well and good—although taken at face value, not very encompass-
ing. In a general sense, you would be hard-pressed to really justify calling those
things “artificial intelligence.� They are too simple. In some ways, they could be
accomplished by a flip of a coin, a roll of the dice, or simply by a single “If…then�
statement such as the player entering a room.
Lately, there has been a massive expansion of the ideas that fall into the purview
of game AI. In the name of “realism� in games, many of these expansions and ex-
plorations have been flowing in the direction of trying to mimic behaviors—either
by individuals, teams, or complex systems. Given the inherent complexity of indi-
vidual psychology and group dynamics, sometimes this task seems to be more
Sisyphean than Herculean. We can never
quite
be finished. Just when we think we
have emulated behaviors, another caveat appears, and our algorithmic rock rolls
back to the bottom of the hill. We will never solve the challenge of replicating
human, animal, or alien behavior on the technological side because we will likely
never be able to solve those behaviors on the
psychological
side. The only thing we
can do is continue to examine and study and break things down as far as we can.
Maybe the next time we push the rock up hill, it will feel a lot easier.
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