How AI in games works

Fri, 03/06/2009 - 18:27 - NLN

You probably don’t think that the average rabbit is particularly intelligent. They generally like eating grass, hopping around and digging holes. How complicated could such a small animal be?

Well, in early 2008, IBM embarked on a project to digitally simulate the cerebral cortex of such a small mammal at the Thomas J Watson Research Center. The test used 8,192 processors and 2.8TB of memory on the Blue Gene-L supercomputer to simulate the 22 million neurons and 11 billion synapses found in the16cm2 cortical surface of a rabbit’s brain.

Simulating even primitive intelligence is extremely demanding, so how does a basic PC go about simulating human intelligence in multiple game characters at once?