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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002112970

Printed in the United States of America

First printing: December 2003

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About the Author

Alex J. Champandard has a strong academic background in artificial intelligence, with science and engineering degrees from York and Edinburgh. He often speaks about his AI research, notably at the Game Developers Conference, where he also hosts a roundtable on learning AI. As the lead programmer of FEAR (an open source game AI project), he consults with professional programmers to integrate state-of-the-art prototypes into commercial games . Founder of AI-Depot, a popular community AI site, he brings regular tutorials to an audience of AI enthusiasts . Alex has also contributed multiple articles to the AI Game Programming Wisdom series. He is part of the AI Interface Standards Committee, which intends to define a common specification for game AI techniques.

About the Technical Reviewers

These reviewers contributed their considerable hands-on expertise to the entire development process for AI Game Development . As this book was being written, these dedicated professionals reviewed all the material for technical content, organization, and flow. Their feedback was critical to ensuring that AI Game Development fits our readers' need for the highest-quality technical information.

Eric Dybsand is currently finishing up a series of articles on AI middleware, scheduled to appear later this year. He has consulted on an extensive list of computer games , including designing and developing the AI for Full Spectrum Command , a tactical command simulator used by the U.S. Army. He also has designed strategic AI for MOO3, AI for racing, baseball, and wrestling games. He developed the AI opponents for the real-time strategy game Enemy Nations , and for the first-person shooter games Rebel Moon Revolution and the War in Heaven , and a number of turn -based war games. Eric has been involved with computer game AI since 1987, doing game design, programming, and testing, and is a contributing author on AI to the Game Programming Gems and AI Wisdom series .

Neil Kirby is a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies. He currently develops .NET solutions. His previous assignments included building speech-recognition software and teaching at the university level. Neil holds a masters degree in Computer Science from Ohio State University. In his spare time, he designs multiplayer, tactical combat computer games. Neil is one of the moderators of the AI Roundtables at the Game Developers Conference. He lives with his spouse and son in central Ohio.

Franois Laramee has been involved the interactive entertainment industry since 1991. He has designed, produced, written, or programmed more than 20 games for all sorts of platforms. He has also published two books for game developers - Game Design Perspectives and Secrets of the Game Business -as well as countless articles and a handful of short stories. He has earned graduate degrees in administration and computer science from two different universities, moonlights as a comedy writer, and despite going freelance in 1998, he hasn't starved to death yet. Visit his mediocre web site at, http://pages.infinit.net/idjy.