Source: https://archive.ph/Mrnth
transcript
A snippet from a New York Times article shared on tumblr. It says:
“Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy A.I. programming in the 1980s, with the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man each responding differently to the player’s real-time movements.”.
The post has the caption: “Is this seriously the level of journalism the NYT now tolerates.”
Nah, stuff like the A* algorithm is called Pathing AI and stuff like Steering Behaviors (the kind of simple rules for agent movement that you would see in simulating fish shoals or bird flocks - or more generally “boids” - though it can be used for other stuff) is also sometimes called AI.
Basically the kind of algorithms that make something seem the behave in a lifelike or intelligent way was what tended to be called AI.
The stuff using the kind of technologies that are also in things like LLMs (such as Neural Networks) is called ML (for Machine Learning).
It’s just that the Tech Bros in this latest scam of their have changed the general understood meaning of the acronym AI.
Pathfinding algorithms happen to be what my bachelor thesis was about. Something like D* could generously be called AI as it does modify its parameters as the terrain becomes known or it changes. I don’t think A* is still being used in games today.
But yes, once it became common to call any npc behavior “AI” by gamers, it has been adopted by game developers too.
A* is still very common in games. Part of that is momentum: a lot of libraries use it under the hood and haven’t updated, and there are so many tutorials for A* it’s practically synonymous with pathfinding
IMO, A* in RTS games tended to create a lot of situations like “ore truck runs around two long cliff faces and through the enemy base because that’s the closest ore patch in a straight line”. They mostly fixed this by having specific harvesting locations like Starcraft, as opposed to big ore fields like C&C used to have. Actual pathfinding is as bad as it ever was, but the mechanics and maps were developed to work around it.