   What would you like?
  After reading the recent thread regarding book reviews/suggestions and having thought about this issue occasionally over the past few months, I'd like to put a question to you folks, especially given the diversity of backgrounds, education levels and game AI experience of posters to this forum.If you were to be given a game AI book for Christmas this year, what content would you like to see inside it when you open the cover?Please list up to 5 topics with the view that the book would be not only a learning tool but a reference tool as well. Also, list your 'audience type'. Are you a professional game developer, independent developer, hobby developer, novice, academic, student or fringe-dweller.(and no, I'm not asking this because I want ideas for a book! ;) I'd like to knowwhat it is that our community wants to know/learn about)Cheers,Timkin   
A thorough breakdown of the various aspects of the practical application of realtime competitive machine learning algorithms.Not to much to ask for, is it?;  Ironically, or maybe not so much, I am getting an AI book for Christmas. I'm a hobby developer, so what I want to see in a book are the topics that are interesting rather than practical. Namely, Learning AI topics such as neural nets, back propogation, genetic algorithms etc. Finite State machines, pathfinding, and pure math methods I can just look up when I need them so I've never had any reason to get a book. Though I'm sure the difficulty and broadness of the learning AI topics also has something to do with it.;  Being an academic and an aspiring game developer, I feel that there needs to be books that link the two.I want to see something solidly grounded in academia with the latest topics and research on distributed AI (possible trend of the future), multi-agent systems, and swarm intelligence while creating links to potential applications in practical scenarios.  I think the industry has gotten better with game AI and its really matured enough to propel it forward even further with an injection of new theoretics.So, I guess in a book, I would really want the best of both worlds to present to the readers a bridge between the two and paths to push forward.   ;  Decision trees applied to game development (specifically to strategy games), that would be something interesting to read.I can't think of the other four right now... :)   ;  Ok, if Santa was to magically drop a five part artificial intelligence book down the chimney, as a hobby game developer I'd like to see:1) A decent section on neural nets, including training, selecting proper inputs, dimension reduction, unsupervised networks, etc.2) A detailed section on pathfinding, including hierarchical techniques, choosing heuristic functions, techniques when the agent has incomplete knowledge of the search space and a detailed analysis of an A* implementation with particular focus on the data structures used.3) A section on AI techniques for extreme situations. i.e. low memory, gargantuan number of actors, high latency situations, and so on.4) A section with case studies/postmortems on various real/semi-real time AI applications (such as games, speech recognition, or handwriting recognition).5) A section where a number of independent people/teams are given the task of developing an artificial intellegence for some kind of competition and the each person/team explains their final product, their thought process and the techniques they used.   ;  As an academic/professional developer, I'd love to see 5 big professional game developers discussing AI of their recent titles. Not just simple postmortems, but in-depth description of different parts of AI, including development efforts, implementation details and performance measurements. Different genres and platforms!-Jarmo   ;  I'm a professional software developer (for the last 3 years), a student (working on a BS in CS for the same 3 years), a hobbyist game developer, and an amateur academic =-)I'd love to see something that covers cooperative, adaptive, planning-and-execution real-time (ie during game play) systems. I'm interested in something of the level that would execute military maneuvers (probably after much learning) without having been pre-programmed with such patterns (beyond certain basic axioms), and also have events such as self-sacrifice meant to (though not guaranteed to actually) save allied entities once in a while (though each entity should not be generally inclined to do such a thing).Especially interesting to me is how to deal with real-world constraints, such as communication cost (for radio - stop some actions and store held equipment {might involve setting equipment down and staying in place, might mean putting equipment in backpack/belt/pocket/holster and continuing to move}, retrieve radio, use radio {which makes noise of level X}, communicate commands, store radio, retrieve equipment; for hand signals - need one hand free, make signal, but less expressivity and shorter range, also need to ensure others watch for signals) when attempting to cooperate.Also important is that the system is watchable (has a representation that allows easily understandable realtime {during game play} display for any number of involved entities), generalizable (has a representation that allows the 'knowledge' of one or more entities to be combined with the 'knowledge' of one or more other entities), predictable (given the same inputs, get the same outputs), and be able to generalize (given similar inputs, get similar outputs).Another area I'm interested in is trying to work the opposite way - take a set of events (such as from a gameplay recording) and analyze it for the purpose of 'rationalizing' the actions of each person, offering alternate courses of action and evaluations of both the actions chosen and those the computer selected (being able to take into account only the information available to the entity at each moment, and also able to take into account all the available information). This would be essentially a more free form version of what most serious chess software offers. It would be nice to have realtime (with more room for delays than game play, think something like "HLTV" that gives observers the data with a 30 second delay, but still must provide information at a pace approximating the gameplay itself), but understandably serious analysis could take quite some time (especially if the evaluation includes a full statistical-based simulation of all entities).Of course, that's more what I want to create than what I want in the book, but perhaps you (knowing far more about AI than I do) can extract some ideas from that =-)   ;  As a hobbyist, my interests are in Finite State Machines and "simulated worlds".In other words, I want to create and instantiate a "Robot" class.  The instance or object of class Robot would be able to move around a simulated "world" of sorts, detect what other objects are, look for stuff, attack other robots or know when to retreat and look for a power source...things like that.Here is an example of what I am talking about:Robot Battle;  Hehehe... just as I suspected... people obviously want different things... but interestingly, most of you seem to want to see a book that has AI techniques applied to games (as opposed to game-AI techniques). Do you folks feel that there are already appropriate reference books out there, targetted at the game AI developer, that cover the traditional techniques? I don't count series like Game AI Wisdom as 'reference books', since they are collected works.My personal view is that there is a need for such a reference book, such that someone with basic programming skills and first year undergraduate mathematics could easily traverse the book and obtain a thorough understanding of the techniques that they would need to know as a junior game AI programmer. Such a book would have a wide appeal, not only as a reference for the industry, but also for independant and hobbyist developers.A second volume of such a work could look at advanced topics; decision and planning systems, classification/clustering and pattern recognition, learning (supervised and unsupervised), etc. Given its scope it would necessarily be an introductory book to these topics, giving enough information for a basic implementation on a 'typical' problem.Coming from an academic position I would view these books as to whether they would be suitable texts for 2nd and 3rd year courses (respectively) in game AI development, but also with the thought that there would be a wide audience of professional and independent developers who would like to gain something from the books (and some may have less education while others have significantly more + experience).I think that's the key problem though... such a disparity in backgrounds.Keep the suggestions coming though... I enjoy reading them... and maybe some publisher will stumble by, see our thoughts and commission some books that fulfil our desires! 8)Cheers,Timkin   