Imperfect machines

I don't often mention artificial intelligence news, even though I've written extensively on the Unangband AI, because there is a great blog AI Game Dev which already covers the state of the art in AI game development. But I've just read a couple of articles which re-iterate in more depth a couple of points I made about the Unangband AI, which I haven't seen mentioned much elsewhere.

Terren Suydam writes about the need for emergent behaviour in AI on Machines Like Us, because of the failure of existing AI techniques.

Soren Johnson has just put up the slides from his GDC seminar Playing to Lose, which discusses how you should make the AI in a single player game lose in an entertaining way, as opposed to try to win.

Both of these talk about forgetting about traditional AI techniques and trying to do something a little different. I find discussion of A* algorithms and goal planners quite dry and not very useful, which is why I tried to give a helicopter view of the Unangband AI as opposed to drilling down into detail. I will at some point write some more on the 4GAI that the Unangband AI is based on, as several people have requested this.

[Edit: Links to Soren Johnson's talk can be found here.