Creating Believable and Effective AI Agents for Games and Simulations: Reviews and Case Study

The rapid development of complex virtual worlds (most notably, in 3D computer and video games) introduces new challenges for the creation of virtual agents, controlled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Two important sub-problems in this topic area that need to be addressed are (a) believability and (b) effectiveness of agents’ behavior (i.e. human-likeness of the characters and high ability to achieving their own goals). In this chapter, the authors study current approaches to believability and effectiveness of AI behavior in virtual worlds. They examine the concepts of believability and effectiveness and analyze several successful attempts to address these challenges. In conclusion, the authors provide a case study that suggests that believable and effective behavior can be achieved through learning behavioral patterns from observation with subsequent automatic selection of effective acting strategies.