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