Gallery

abstract

Artificial intelligence (A.I) has for a long time now been a pre-occupation of the computer scientists. Their continual quest to make computers and robots become more life-like was forever progressing, but all the average citizen ever witnessed of this was the occasional item in the media showing small robots ‘avoiding’ colliding into walls or each other. However it has only been recently (the past few years) that the computer games industry has started using this technology within their media to any great amount. This has created an upsurge in interest in a subject once only the domain of computer boffins and science fiction fans and has now become far more accessible to people less accomplished in the field. Because of its use in the games, and more broadly, the entertainment industry, A.I has become more visible to the public, and because of this no longer are the computer game fans contents with competing against an enemy which moves from one point to another and shoots it’s weapon every two seconds, now they demand the opposition to be a thinking challenging opponent. These facts inspired this project (the details of which follow) that will hopefully shed some light on the sometimes mysterious subject of artificial intelligence and also produce an entertaining result.

The aim of the project which is outlined in this article was to create a simple A.I system in a modern computer package, which using the principles employed and incorporated into games by the games industry, will create an entertaining piece of animation. This will predominately consist of a simulated battle between a number of A.I agents. In the first section the major ways of approaching the development of A.I will be covered. After which the comparative usefulness and practicality of such methods to create computer game characters/enemies/entities will be invetigated . Finally in this section the basic principles for designing intelligent game agents will be outlined.

The second section will look at the implementation of these theories in the fore mentioned animation and how the choice of which form to use in the implementation was taken (primarily based on the previous research). Then the how the animation was created will be described and finally the limitations and aspirations of the project.
The project will then be evaluated and a conclusion drawn towards the success of the project and research.

avoidence.mpg

bot_cam.mpg

collision_mk1.mpg

GMidgley.zip

working_capture.mpg

avoidence.mpg

bot_cam.mpg

collision_mk1.mpg

GMidgley.zip

working_capture.mpg