Air Traffic
A million minds, a million miles.
By Matthew Shaer
Not so long ago, a former musician named Dave Mark had an idea for a video game. This was back near the turn of the millennium, when the industry blood lust for phantasmagoric spectacle and point-and-click carnage had not yet been fully ushered in. Demanding games like Black & White were a hit with critics; the supremely realistic Operation Flashpoint, was scooped up by the US military, for use in training recruits. Mark's idea was to take the things that made these games good - that game them complexity, strategy, and intricacy - and tweak the artificial intelligence to such a degree that they became great.
Mark, who is fond of saying a good AI designer must also be a good psychologist, was primarily interested in how he could best replicate human behavior. "AI in games is generally too limited, and because of that, it is too predictable," Mark told me recently. "In most cases, even in highly-advanced games, a player either knows exactly what's coming, or knows how the enemy or ally is going to respond. If this, then that. If that, then this. AI has gotten better over time, but there is still a point in many titles when the game play starts to look really very stupid."
