I was wondering how to make an AI. The most obvious one is to just write every concievable situation and then run. I would rather have an AI that has at least some idea of what's going on around it and makes logical decisions. I also want it to be able to logically predict what might happen, as well. Any ideas?
The AI you use really depends on your game, but there are a some cases where you can use a "generic" AI and then add or remove components based on what it needs to do.
Several good examples of the types of generic behavior that can be implemented are found in Craig Reynolds' GDC paper entitled "Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters". I've found it quite useful and am working on a Phrogram implementation of a basic AI agent that follows most of these behaviors. However, it's more directed towards games with AI units that roam about in real-time and are not confined to a game board, and is therefore only useful in a handful of games. RTS/Action-RPG/MMO-RPG games are the most likely to need something like this.
I think the overall gist of the paper applies to most AI though...You have a set of rules that you follow and use to adapt to any given scenario. In most cases, hard-coding each and every possible scenario is simply too time-consuming.
I don't really know much more on the subject, other than it's challenging to make a smart computer player.
Often you don't need 'real ai' as the players won't notice all your clever stuff. What you will need will depend greatly on the type of game - there is no general answer.
This is the main site on the subject http://aigamedev.com/ though I'm not expert enough to know where the best place to start is. I have heard good things about this book too http://www.amazon.com/AI-Game-Developers-David-Bourg
well after hearing of your real time strategy game, megehand, if it was a shotting game for example, i'd make it so that if you aim at a dude, he hides, else he aims ate you, giving a few seconds and on purpose bumbness to make it a tadd easier...
my youtube's PhrogramDude
Unfortunately, making the AI bad at shooting is the really hard part (illogical, huh?).
interesting idea! does sound fun! so we would just write some AI code and you would integerate it into the program you wrote? if so, i think it might be a good idea to just send us the source code of the AI-less pong game and we could then test our code to see if it works i'm also making a player vs. computer tic tac toe, so it'll be fun to see how that goes...