This week, the world's leading researchers in the field of Game AI have gathered in Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany, to consider future applications and what needs to be done to bring those ideas to life. Representatives from industry were in a minority, but that's why AiGameDev.com was there to balance things out!

This week, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2012 is taking place in San Francisco, and we're proud to announce that the AiGameDev.com Squad is covering the event live and interactively. Read on for details and highlights from the first few days!

The Paris Game/AI Conference 2011 that took place last month represented a turning point for the field of artificial intelligence in game development. While Game AI has traditionally been associated with non-player character behavior and occasionally opponent strategy, this was the first conference to showcase the newly found breadth of the field — from procedural generation to experience management, including data-mining and physics-based motion.

One of the (few) perks of being a research student is attending conferences. There are many reasons to attend a conference: you get to travel to places you probably wouldn't otherwise visit, toss around ideas with other people who work in the same research area and get a glimpse into the state of the art approaches for problems you might not ever have considered.

Earlier this month, the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games took place at the IT University in Copenhagen. Over 100 researchers from around the world showed up to present their very latest research. In between, there were inspiring keynotes from highly respected figures in the research community, with topics ranging from A-life and bottom-up aesthetics to top-down drama management. AiGameDev.com was there to cover the event, and I (Alex Champandard) gave a tutorial on the first day too.

Two years ago, I briefly met Jason Della Rocca in Paris and he was genuinely surprised that our inaugural Game AI Workshop '08 sold out to a whole fifty (50) people! I got a metaphorical pat on the back, and went back to work. Last year, our Game AI Conference '09 found its home at the CNAM, but we didn't have any fancy badges, no branding signs or posters, and one of our coffee breaks accidentally turned into a tea break *gasp*. Yet still almost two hundred developers (200) joined us in Paris over two days, and a community was born.

The way you chose to model your game agents has a huge impact on their artificial intelligence. In fact, if you get a solid model in place, the solution to the main AI problem will become almost obvious! A perfect example is Black Rock Studio's acclaimed dirt-bike racer, PURE. The designers on the game wanted to avoid rubber band AI, but how do you do that in practice?

Certainly one of my biggest take aways from the Paris Game AI Conference 2009 was the rise of hierarchical task network (HTN) planning techniques for games. The potential is huge, from helping reduce behavior modelling overheads when creating purposeful behaviors and automatically generating large missions for the player to take part in, both these domains can benefit from HTN planners.