Comment Re:Always fascinating. (Score 5, Insightful) 194
In other words they are retarded, which is good because there are four of them and they'd box the player in in about 10 seconds if they weren't.
Yes. There's this persistent myth that smart game AI is hard to build. It's not. A really smart, impossible-to-beat game AI is easy to build (for most types of games). What's hard to build is a sort-of-smart-but-often-fallible AI that's just competent enough that it makes you feel like you're accomplishing something worthwhile when you finally beat it. For extra bonus hardness points you can try building an AI that makes the same kind of sub-optimal choices that a human would make so that it feels "alive". That's hard to do.
Game AIs have all kinds of advantages that make it easy (again, for most types of games) to build them to be unbeatable. They have always have instant reaction time, they can consider a large number of disparate data streams simultaneously, they always have perfect knowledge of their environment, they can have vast libraries of pre-computed decision trees, and their accuracy in moving, aiming, etc is limited only by the precision of floating-point data types. (An aside: the reason why real-world robotics is so hard is largely because real-world robots have really terrible knowledge of their environment, unlike game AIs.) The trick to writing a top-quality game AI is to figure out how to degrade and handicap all of those advantages in ways that leave them beatable while not leaving them looking stupid.