This is reprint of the feature article I did for Game Developer Magazine for their August 2012 issue. This is slightly longer than what appeared in the magazine. (They also had a lot of cool pictures of Mexican food.)

AI Architectures: A Culinary Guide (GDMag Article)

Very nice article and helpful,

An open question for me are genetic algorithms. Where would they fit in your big picture...is the current state of the art to combine NN and genetic algorithms? I've read some papers about that but have not seen any non-theoretic example.

Or are they more or less currently only used for optimization problems, that is for example playing an optimizer role in a planing task?

Genetic algorithms are optimization tools. Writing AI for a game is not primarily an optimization problem, so in my opinion they don't fit anywhere in the picture.

Great article! Thanks for sharing it.

I thought that the AI system I'm working on is similar in its function to a behavior tree but it's actually an utility-based AI. My intention is to use genetic algorithms to train the AI to value each 'action'. It will be a while til I get that far though...

Thank you for this article, very helpful.

Very good article, didn't realize there was a term for the AI that I was writing (BT).

In "Programming Game AI by Example", one of the architectures presented is called a Goal-based AI. Where does this particular architecture fit in?

The reason I ask is because I am working on a game using this particular architecture, but I have not encountered it anywhere else.

(I think it is a really good architecture...)

In "Programming Game AI by Example", one of the architectures presented is called a Goal-based AI. Where does this particular architecture fit in?

The reason I ask is because I am working on a game using this particular architecture, but I have not encountered it anywhere else.
(I think it is a really good architecture...)

It's a planner (a.k.a. "fajita"). I haven't look at "Programming Game AI by Example" in a while, but my guess is their method is something like GOAP.

No, It's not a planner. It just has a misleading name...

What is it, then?