Game AI: The Possible Bridge between Ambient and Artificial Intelligence

A critical role for the development of Ambient Intelligence will be played by Artificial Intelligence. Within its latest approach, Artificial Intelligence is considered as being embedded into an environment and measured by the success or failure of its interactions. The basic idea behind this approach is captured by the model of an intelligent agent: the agent receives information from the environment with its sensors and subsequently performs actions that change the environment’s current state. From this perspective, the challenges faced by autonomous agents are similar to the challenges humans accomplish every day. One example is given by the annually held RoboCup competitions, where robots compete in a football game but also fight for the rescue of civilians in a simulated large-scale disaster simulation. Further, the latest generation of game engines shows clearly that the trend leads towards more realistic physics simulations, agent centered perception, and complex player interactions due to the rapidly increasing degrees of freedom that digital characters obtain. This new freedom requests another quality of the player's environment, a quality of ambient intelligence that appears both plausible and in real time. This intelligence has, for example, to control more than 40 facial muscles of digital characters while they interact with humans, but also to control a team of digital characters for the support of human players. The chapter discusses how methods from RoboCup might contribute to make Artificial Intelligence more “natural” improving both the performance and plausibility of its digital characters. Furthermore, it describes state-of-the-art game engines and discuss the challenge but also the opportunity they are offering to Artificial Intelligence research.