Chapter 12. Making Silicon Think with Artificial Intelligence

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that…"

—HAL 9000, 2001: A Space Odyssey

This chapter is going to answer a lot of questions about the black art of artificial intelligence. In fact, depending on how you look at things, artificial intelligence is not artificial at all. It is an intelligence of sorts based on logic, mathematics, probability, and memory—and isn't that all we are?

By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to write code and algorithms to make game creatures perform in a reasonable manner and do almost anything that you want them to do. Here's what's covered:

• Artificial intelligence primer

• Simple deterministic algorithms

• Patterns and scripts

• Behavioral state systems

• Memory and learning

• Planning and decision trees

• Pathfinding

• Advanced scripting languages

• Neural network basics

• Genetic algorithms

• Fuzzy logic