Hello, I was looking for some names of Games AI researchers for my project but couldn't find much relevant ones. I was wondering if you guys here could share some of the names that have experience in Game AI or have come up with AI that has been implemented in games. Thanks

Depend what you consider "relevant". Lots of people fancy themselves "researchers", especially in game AI.

Hmm .. actually this "project" basically involves getting us to know more about Game AI and stuffs so we would be more familiar with this field when it comes to technical terms and all, so its kinda hard for me to define "relevant" here. I'd say those guys who wrote on these AIs and explains on them and those who come up with AIs that could be implemented in games (like Craig Reynolds who came up with the Boids and flocking) if must.

Well, almost by definition, the vast majority of the people working on "Game AI" are in the games industry. That means, in general, that they can't tell anyone about how they did things because that information belongs to the company. There are however presentations at conferences like GDC which reveal some of the algorithms and techniques used on games that have already shipped. You can find a good compendium of information here:

http://aigamedev.com/

Remember that Game AI is not academia. We don't generally publish papers or tell other people the full truth of how we do things because we're not allowed to (except as previously mentioned under special circumstances).

Companies = capitalism = don't like to share.

There is a TON of academic AI research going on. But unless it's actually in a game, it's not really Game AI (perhaps just the semantics as I see them). We certainly take all the info from academia and apply lots of it within games, but game AI is more or less parlor tricks in comparison with cutting edge AI research.

Our objective is not to actually create intelligence, but to trick the user into thinking that we did.

For instance. A couple things that tend to make people think an AI agent is actually intelligent within the context of a game:

1) How many hitpoints they have (more correlates to "more intelligence")
2) Rolling random numbers. Purely random choices are often interpreted as intelligence because the person writes a story in their head for why the unit did that.

-me

I would read the AI game wisdom books that someone talked about earlier this week. Real papers by real game AI developpers.

Quote: Original post by Steadtler
... real game AI developpers.

We only become developpers when we are using too many clock cycles and have to lop off a good section of our nifty code.

I suggest you look into the proceedings of conferences on game AI. My AIIDE '07 coverage is a good place to start.

AIIDE 2007 papers
AIIDE 2007 posters

There are lots of names of researchers you can look up there...

Quote: Original post by InnocuousFox

Quote: Original post by Steadtler
... real game AI developpers.

We only become developpers when we are using too many clock cycles and have to lop off a good section of our nifty code.

Et on a trop de temps à tuer lorsqu'on commence à corriger l'orthographe sur des babillards...

Who the hell cares?