Alice and Kev is quite an astounding project built around AI and storytelling in The Sims 3. Their creator destroyed all their wealth to see how they would behave as homeless sims, and the results are surprisingly human. Go there and read it. Most astounding moment yet is the post Selflessness, but I doubt it [...]

Midlands games developers seem to be well ahead of the rest of the country in utilising funding offered by the Technology Strategy Board. As well as Monumental being funded recently, Emote just announced £600K from them as part of a £1.3M project to improve AI in networked environments.
They are also apparently partnering with Imperial College [...]

This is quite an interesting tidbit on convergence and the games industry: Autodesk are buying AI middleware developers Kynogon, but it’s the latter who’ll be taking the lead on games technology. Quote:
He says this as he and fellow founder Pierre Pontevia will head up Autodesk’s new games technology group with ‘to bridge the gap between [...]

There they go, chipping away a little more at the uncanny valley. Not long now until we start climbing the other side, but all those photo-real, ersatz humans are going to act in a downright spooky way unless we can bootstrap AI to match the standards of their appearance.

Great post from Mark Morris of Introversion, about the inaugural meeting of the AI in Games Network. So far it involves three UK universities meeting a load of game developers. It’s difficult to pick out a highlight from the post, really, the whole thing is worth reading, but I especially like this part where he [...]

Gamasutra just posted a feature I wrote for them: Uncanny AI: Artificial Intelligence In The Uncanny Valley
There are lots of things across all media that can already fool us. The crucial question, though, is how well do they do it? Distance and brevity obscure all manner of flaws, but at some point in a [...]

… quoth Peter Molyneux in this Guardian piece on AI:
That said, Molyneux doesn’t believe AI can be solely responsible for intense, dynamic emotional experiences; they need to be married with what he calls “smoke and mirrors”.
“You have to define what games developers call AI,” he says, “as opposed to academic AI. There’s actually very little [...]