!rant

If you're into AI and easy breakdowns go check out:

http://www.gameaipro.com/

Dozens of really great ebooks on the subject, free of charge, no signup/signin required.

Do mental breakdowns count?

AI is s snake oil mostly, and overrated.

@aviophile how so? This stuff works and is pretty impressive.

@RememberMe simple pattern matching is oversold and rebranded as AI. It is advertised as doom of humanity while best cases of them hashuman in the loop. You can find much more structured criticism than my ramblings on google.

@aviophile that's just terminology. The AI that the doomsayers are talking about is the modern deep-neural-net-on-a-cluster approach which is so much more powerful than simple pattern matching. It can do legit scary stuff.

The AI used in games is naturally constrained because of runtime cost, but even there they use decision trees, goal based approaches, lots and lots of graph algorithms, etc. Definitely more than "simple pattern matching" (for an old example that holds up well, check out FEAR's goal based AI). And modern games have started using neural nets too.

And both of these are "artificial intelligence" agents from the definition of the term, but they shouldn't be confused. AI literally just means an agent that's capable of decision making, it says nothing about how complex those decisions have to be. AlphaGo and AlphaStar are AIs, but so is a bunch of if statements. DNN based AIs can scale to pretty damn complex representations, so they can take pretty sophisticated decision.