ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a brief introduction to some of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques used in games. Of all the forms and applications of AI, games use a very small subset, the majority of which is to develop the behavior of nonplayer characters (NPCs). AI algorithms require a lot of computational processing. AI is a theoretically intensive field grounded in applied mathematics, numerical computing, and psychology. Almost all AI techniques used in games rely on the programmers having an understanding of graphs. There are High methods to find the shortest path from one node to another in a graph. These include algorithms such as breadth-first search (BFS) and depth-first search (DFS). The most popular algorithm used in games, for searching graphs, is called A*. The most popular form of AI in games and NPCs is nondeterministic automata, or what is more commonly known as finite state machines (FSM).
