DM810 Computer Game Programming II: AI

Fall 2008, 2nd quarter
Rolf Fagerberg

Official Course Description

See the course description at the web pages of the faculty.

Time and Place

The schedule is:

The course takes place in weeks 45 through 51. The first lecture is Monday, November 3.

Textbook

As textbook, we will use the following:

Artificial Intelligence for Games
By Ian Millington
Published by Morgan Kaufmann, 2006
ISBN 0124977820, 9780124977822

The book can be bought in the SDU bookstore. It can be inspected online on the web. The book has a website, but not with much additional material.

Examination

The exam is oral, with grades on the 7-point marking scale. There is a programming project which must be passed in order to attend the exam. The deadline for the project is Monday, January 12, 2009, at 12:00.

The exam date will be January 21, and the exam will take place in U49C. The curriculum is everything mentioned under the heading Reading in the list of lectures below (respecting the exceptions stated there), except for the chapters 1 and 2 and the slides. At the oral exam, you will draw an exam question delineating a part of curriculum which you are to present. The details of the exam format are described at the bottom of the list of exam questions.

There will be a spørgetime (session for asking questions on the exam and the curriculum) Monday, January 19, at 10.15 in U49B.

The grades at the exam ended up with the following distribution.

Lectures

Date Time Room Contents Reading
Monday, November 3 12-14 Imada seminar room Introduction to course. Introduction to Game AI (slides). The slides. Chapter 1 and 2 in the textbook.
Friday, November 7 12-14 Imada seminar room Movement: kinematic and dynamic algorithms, basic building blocks. Sections 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.1-12 in the textbook.
Monday, November 10 12-14 Imada seminar room More movement algorithms. Sections 3.3.13-16 and 3.4 in the textbook.

Additional info (not curriculum): Most of the movement algorithms in Section 3.3 seem originally due to Craig Reynolds, starting with his 1987 flocking paper. His extensive website (many dead links now, though) includes a nice overview paper from 1999, accompanied by some good applets demonstrating most steering behaviors from Section 3.3 (not all are defined exactly as in the textbook, though). Further applets and demo programs on flocking can be found here, here, and here.
Friday, November 14 12-14 Imada seminar room Even more movement algorithms. Sections 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7.1-5 in the textbook.
Monday, November 17 12-14 Imada seminar room Even more movement algorithms. Pathfinding: Dijkstra and A*. Sections 3.7.6-10, 3.8, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3.1-7 in the textbook.
Friday, November 21 12-14 Imada seminar room Handout and discussion of project. More on pathfinding and graphs for pathfinding. Sections 4.3.8 and 4.4 in the textbook.
Monday, November 24 12-14 Imada seminar room More on pathfinding. Decision making: decision trees, state machines. Rest of Chapter 4 in the textbook (except 4.7, which will not be curriculum). Sections 5.1-3 in the textbook.
Friday, November 28 12-14 Imada seminar room More on decision making: Fuzzy logic. Sections 5.4 in the textbook.
Monday, December 1 12-14 Imada seminar room Even more on decision making: Markov state machines, goal-oriented behavior, rule based systems. Sections 5.5-7 in the textbook (except 5.6.6, which will not be curriculum).
Friday, December 5 12-14 Imada seminar room Even more on decision making: Blackboard architectures, AI scripting, action management. Start on tactical and strategic AI. Sections 5.8-10 (5.9 can be read very lightly) and 6.1 in the textbook.
Monday, December 8 12-14 Imada seminar room More on tactical and strategic AI. Section 6.2 in the textbook (except 6.2.6, which will not be curriculum).
Thursday, December 11 12-14 U46 A bit more on tactical and strategic AI. AI scheduling Rest of Chapter 6 in the textbook. Section 9.1 in the textbook.
Monday, December 15 12-14 Imada seminar room More on AI scheduling. AI for board games. Rest of Chapter 9 in the textbook. Sections 8.1 and 8.2.1-3 in the textbook.
Friday, December 19 12-14 Imada seminar room More on AI for board games. Rest of Chapter 8 in the textbook (except Sections 8.2.7 and 8.4, which will not be curriculum).

Course Evaluation

As part of the Study Boards schedule of course evaluations, a course evaluation has been carried out (after the course, before the exam). The aggregated answers (with comments removed for anonymity, as required by the Study Board) and the teachers plan of actions are now available.

Maintained by Rolf Fagerberg (rolf@imada.sdu.dk)