Poll #31: 08/20/02 - 09/30/02


AI: Who's Making it Better?
Who do you think is doing a 'better job' overall to advance the field of Artificial Intelligence in general?
[213 votes total]
The Game industry, no doubt about it. (54) 25%
Academia and their many research projects. (53) 25%
The Military with their need for "smart weapons" and the like. (27) 13%
They're probably all about equal. (15) 7%
The OpenSource community. (26) 12%
People doing books like AI Game Programming Gems and the like. (7) 3%
The roundtables and presentations at GDC, of course! (4) 2%
As near as I can tell "AI" means "Artificial Idiot" to nearly everybody. (27) 13%

Steve's Comments: Well now--I can honestly say that this poll was the result of simple curiousity on my part more than anything else. At the various GDC AI roundtables developers have often expressed the impression that their academic brethern were doing bang-up work in AI, while it seemed as if many of those same academics were envious of the "dedication to results" that the game industry regularly produces. Given my line of work I've also received rather a fair share of emails on the issue of military simulations and their AIs; some of the brightest minds I know in the game business are now doing military contract work and finding it most rewarding.

It seems as if the respect of people for the progress of the game industry and advances within academia continues, to judge from these results. Military and the OpenSource communities come in second, though an equal number of folks don't seem to think there's much of any AI developments to be proud of.

I'm a bit surprised (and really it's as an engineer not an author) that more folks don't feel that the GDC roundtables and the Game Programming Gems books are making any kind of breakthroughs. I know I've seen plenty of "ah ha!" looks at the roundtables, certainly. Perhaps these venues are viewed as better at dissemenating knowledge of techniques than inventing new ones, a view I could certainly agree with.