Of all the aspects that go into a game, AI is arguably the element that still resembles voodoo to the uninitiated. Whilst off the shelf solutions exist for graphics, physics and so on, good middleware for AI remains effectively out of reach, primarily because no two game worlds are exactly alike and the goal of each AI system within a single world is different. There are no one- size-fits-all solutions as opposed to say physics, where gravity and collisions will work the same almost anywhere, independent of context. In essence then, AI isn't so much a teachable system as it is a mindset, and we don't need to learn libraries or code fragments so much as we need a toolkit to deal with different situations.
Delivered at the IGDA Summit @ Casual Connect Seattle, July 2012.
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