AI SIG Roundtable

The AI SIG Roundtable run by Alexander Nareyek looked at the, basically dead, AI SIG and how to revive it.

Something that annoyed me was, despite this being a sometimes good set of ideas being put forwards, without anyone actually wanting to do the work, nothing will get done and the SIG will continue to stagnate. None of the ideas raised are easy to do – although binning the standards project would help, if anyone was still working on it that is.

Time will tell. I personally will wait and see what happens – I have personal issues with the way things are being organised so I won’t offer any help, but I might in the future if the direction changes for the better.

Notes

Things the SIG does:
– Not much action on the standards committee
– Annual/bi-annual newsletter

News:
– New IGDA site to consolidate things

Things to do:
– Game AI quality
– Better working conditions/procedures
– Promoting professional development
– Connection with peers

In general the standardisation thing is not working. It’s difficult to standardise if it is even possible in the first place
Hard to even find what the core building blocks are between AI developers
What was the aim?
– To build something for these interfaces
How many middleware people got on board?
– Some
It is going to bloom into a game engine. Would be better to look at techniques
More like trying to do game design API’s!
Might be better to come up with a standardised way of testing these problems, techniques – general approaches
Some look at the pros and cons of the techniques of making AI – scripting to C++ to whatever. Choose your path.
Has the AI standards been making progress?
Closed list, very few members in the rooms
Pieces of things in bite sized chunks are a better idea

Parallel tracks of progress between the AI SIG and the developers making things
You need moderation on the middleware, it is hard to do.
Put forward the academia side to developers and push advances
Also international communication is a problem
– IGDA Japan has problems with having different game types now which need more AI then what Final Fantasy has because they have to sell abroad. Almost all techniques are in English and Japanese don’t know English. No professional AI programmer in Japan either.
– Translation will be on the site at some point
Who is going to do it?
– Need volunteers and people getting value out of helping
– AIIDE things perhaps
– reviewing papers – who can do this?
Maybe have ways of templates of C++ code like Boost

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