New ideas for AI in games?

[LP]

In a number of ways, I think the more complex you make an AI, often the less 'real' if feels. To borrow from Terry Goodkind, you often have to keep the "Wizard's First Rule" in mind: People are stupid. Sometimes the simpler your logic, the more intelligent it feels to the player.

Actually, I think if you invest too much on AI, it will feel predictable or "wired". In real life, many things are based on very simple rules, or at least "simple" rules have major influence for an external observer (e.g. flowers open during the day and close for the night, etc.), so if you keep AI simple yet flexible, it will be quite joyful to play with.

This is why in some schools the entire "AI" theme was dropped and replaced by "Intelligent Systems", which lately have been displaced by database and math related courses, since in many cases the "classical" AI is either application of random theory or one or more search algorithms.

Scripted logic feels intelligent -- because it has a plan -- throw in just a hair of randomness to make it less predictable, and you're golden.

This also happens elsewhere: when you are reading a book, which you can think of as a "script", you are imagining the entire scene, characters and so on. I think, this is because typical situations that we can think of, can be scripted, and when reproduced, it is quite easy to mistake the scripted part with the actual reality.