ABSTRACT
Randomness, when carefully and judiciously applied, can be a powerful tool for augmenting the behavior of game artificial intelligence (AI) agents and systems. A formal grammar is a tool for describing and potentially manipulating a sequence or stream of data. Grammars are used for textual inputs, and operate on sequences known as strings. Looking at the actual rule for nonzero digits, there is one additional important symbol, the pipe. This indicates alternations, that is, that a choice must be made from several alternatives. Grammars need not be relegated to use with pure text or numbers. Grammars typically have a selected set of starting symbols which control the first rule(s) used when creating a new string. Supplementing a grammar with this random selection process is akin to describing how “likely” a given generated string might be.
