Key Topics
Emergence is a particularly popular topic in both the artifi cial intelligence (AI) and game-development communities. Emergent phenomena are particularly interesting yet somewhat mystical. AI researchers are keen to capture emergence properties to improve their intelligent systems, and designers are keen to increase the entertainment of their games. As game AI developers, our interests lie in producing more efficient nonplayer characters (NPCs) with simpler techniques and producing more interesting behaviors. The combination of the emotional system with intelligent capabilities generating fascinating scenarios is a good example of an emergent system. We want to understand and reproduce such phenomena. This chapter covers the following topics:
First, a clarification of the concept of emergence is in order. |