This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.

A new vision of the future of games and game design, enabled by AI. Can games measure intelligence? How will artificial intelligence inform games of the future? In Playing Smart, Julian Togelius explores the connections between games and intelligence to offer a new vision of future games and game design. Video games already depend on AI. We use games to test AI algorithms, challenge our thinking, and better understand both natural and artificial intelligence. In the future, Togelius argues, game designers will be able to create smarter games that make us smarter in turn, applying advanced AI to help design games. In this book, he tells us how. Games are the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. In 1948, Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, handwrote a program for chess. Today we have IBM's Deep Blue and DeepMind's AlphaGo, and huge efforts go into developing AI that can play such arcade games as Pac-Man. Programmers continue to use games to test and develop AI, creating new benchmarks for AI while also challenging human assumptions and cognitive abilities. Game design is at heart a cognitive science, Togelius reminds us—when we play or design a game, we plan, think spatially, make predictions, move, and assess ourselves and our performance. By studying how we play and design games, Togelius writes, we can better understand how humans and machines think. AI can do more for game design than providing a skillful opponent. We can harness it to build game-playing and game-designing AI agents, enabling a new generation of AI-augmented games. With AI, we can explore new frontiers in learning and play.

Creating robust artificial intelligence is one of the greatest challenges for game developers, yet the commercial success of a game is often dependent upon the quality of the AI. In this book, Ian Millington brings extensive professional experience to the problem of improving the quality of AI in games. He describes numerous examples from real games and explores the underlying ideas through detailed case studies. He goes further to introduce many techniques little used by developers today. The book's associated web site contains a library of C++ source code and demonstration programs, and a complete commercial source code library of AI algorithms and techniques. "Artificial Intelligence for Games - 2nd edition" will be highly useful to academics teaching courses on game AI, in that it includes exercises with each chapter. It will also include new and expanded coverage of the following: AI-oriented gameplay; Behavior driven AI; Casual games (puzzle games). Key Features * The first comprehensive, professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games written by an engineer with extensive industry experience. * Walks through the entire development process from beginning to end. * Includes examples from over 100 real games, 10 in-depth case studies, and web site with sample code.

What is artificial intelligence? How is artificial intelligence used in game development? Game development lives in its own technical world. It has its own idioms, skills, and challenges. That’s one of the reasons games are so much fun to work on. Each game has its own rules, its own aesthetic, and its own trade-offs, and the hardware it will run on keeps changing. AI for Games is designed to help you understand one element of game development: artificial intelligence (AI).

AI is an integral part of every video game. This book helps professionals keep up with the constantly evolving technological advances in the fast growing game industry and equips students with up-to-date information they need to jumpstart their careers. This revised and updated Third Edition includes new techniques, algorithms, data structures and representations needed to create powerful AI in games. Key Features A comprehensive professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games Includes new exercises so readers can test their comprehension and understanding of the concepts and practices presented Revised and updated to cover new techniques and advances in AI Walks the reader through the entire game AI development process

Learn to make games that are more fun and engaging! Building on fundamental principles of Artificial Intelligence, Funge explains how to create Non-Player Characters (NPCs) with progressively more sophisticated capabilities. Starting with the basic capability of acting in the game world, the book explains how to develop NPCs who can perceive, remem

Research on general video game playing aims at designing agents or content generators that can perform well in multiple video games, possibly without knowing the game in advance and with little to no specific domain knowledge. The general video game AI framework and competition propose a challenge in which researchers can test their favorite AI methods with a potentially infinite number of games created using the Video Game Description Language. The open-source framework has been used since 2014 for running a challenge. Competitors around the globe submit their best approaches that aim to generalize well across games. Additionally, the framework has been used in AI modules by many higher-education institutions as assignments, or as proposed projects for final year (undergraduate and Master's) students and Ph.D. candidates. The present book, written by the developers and organizers of the framework, presents the most interesting highlights of the research performed by the authors during these years in this domain. It showcases work on methods to play the games, generators of content, and video game optimization. It also outlines potential further work in an area that offers multiple research directions for the future.