What were some of the most important moments of 2011 for artificial intelligence in games? Which trends developed over the year, and how do they affect you? Join our editor-in-chief Alex Champandard for his summary of the year and predictions of what's to come!

Position picking and cover selection can be one of the trickiest problems of modern action/combat games. There are many design and technical solutions to this, but one of the most important things to get right is the workflow. In this video tutorial you'll learn how interactive tools can help reduce your turn-around time in tuning a cover selection algorithm.

Modern games feature very complex AI, and it's no secret that the systems break down when subject to the combination of ambitious designers and creative players. YouTube and other social media channels are full of bugs captured from even the most recent games. Looking at these bugs is not only instructive, but can provide unique insights into the implementation itself!

ACHRON is the world's first meta-time strategy game where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently. The game has been in development for many years, but due to the huge challenges and computational requirements needed to simulate the game at multiple points in time, it was only recently announced during the Experimental Gameplay session at GDC.

This year, the GDC celebrated its 25th edition and as such, there were many presentations looking back at classic games as well as reflective sessions from familiar faces. Though the AI Summit was only in its third year it also had the same feeling to it. The line-up combined post-mortems, showcases and tutorials of established ideas and technologies, along with rants and dicussion panels from regular speakers. If anything, this gave the impression that the AI community settled into a "groove" — having little or no trouble solving design and engineering problems as they come up. For instance, the session on "Pathfinding is Not Yet a Solved Problem" showed three developers solve all the issues on their games in very convincing and reproducible ways.

You might think of zombies as not requiring a very big brain of their own, but you'd be wrong! As Valve quickly found out on LEFT 4 DEAD, getting a zombie to be able to reach the player anywhere in the map is quite a navigation problem... and that's just the start. What better time than Halloween to look into the challenges and future of zombie AI.

Over the past decade, blend trees have established themselves in the games industry as a reliable and flexible technique for animating game characters. However, it can take a lot of development time to build up an efficient runtime and powerful toolset, and obviously middleware companies are stepping up!