AI Algorithms on GPU

WeirdoFu · 2005-08-12T04:52:56

It seems that with the increasing power of GPUs on consumer graphics cards, more and more people are trying to figure out what to do with GPUs other than graphics. The scientific computing society has been extremely interested in its uses and have found that GPUs can do sort of large number of elements up to 50 times faster than a CPU can due to the built in parallelism. More on General Purpose Computation on GPU can be found here: http://www.gpgpu.org/ So, my question and idea is whether we can offload AI load from CPUs onto GPUs as well. Of course, to a certain extent it may not be practical, but it would just be one of those cool things that you can say, "hey look, my graphics card can do this too." type of deal. So, for AI in games, I guess the first question people will ask is, "Can we get a GPU to do the A* algorithm for us?" If we can, then that may be fairly interesting application wise too. I know they have pure GPU oriented particle system engines, so why not GPU based game AI engines? Steal a few cycles from the graphics and use it for better AI. So, what do people think?