Contents

Making Them Think

Predefined Behavior

Goal-Directed Behavior

The Middle Ground

A Simple Tutorial: Maze Solving

Discussion

Notes and References

Notes

For some basic information on FSMs see. For more in-depth information on predefined behavior techniques, consult . There are even some commercial character development packages that use HFSMs to define character behavior. Seefor a fascinating discussion on maze-solving techniques. Many of the classic papers on planning can be found infor some work on the use of stochastic techniques for planning. Prolog is the best known nondeterministic programming language and there are numerous references, for example see.

The complex action macro expansion is closely related to work done in proving properties of computer programs. Our definitions are taken from those given in. A more up-to-date version, that includes support for concurrency, appears infor the Scott-Strackey least fixed-point definition of (recursive) procedure execution.

References

J. Allen, J. Hendler, and A. Tate, editors. Readings in Planning. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1990.

N.I. Badler, B.A. Barsky, and D.Zeltzer, editors. Making Them Move: Mechanics, Control, and Animation of Articulated Figures. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, 1991.

I. Bratko. PROLOG Programming for Artificial Intelligence. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990.

J. Funge. AI for Games and Animation: A Cognitive Modeling Approach. A. K. Peters. Natick, MA, 1999.

J. A. Goguen and G. Malcolm. Algebraic Semantics of Imperative Programs. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995.

J. E. Hopcroft and J. D. Ullman. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1979.

Y. Lespérance, H. J. Levesque, and R. Reiter. A Situation Calculus Approach to Modeling and Programming Agents. In A. Rao and M. Wooldridge, editors, Foundations and Theories of Rational Agency. Kluwer, New York, 1999. (See also: www.cs.toronto.edu/cogrobo)

H. Levesque, R. Reiter, Y. Lespérance, F. Lin, and R. Scherl. Golog: A Logic Programming Language for Dynamic Domains. Journal of Logic Programming, 31:59-84, 1997.

P. Maes (editor). Designing Autonomous Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to Engineering and Back. MIT Press, Boston, 1990.

B. A. Nayfeh. "Using a Cellular Automata to Solve Mazes." Dr. Dobb's Journal, February 1993.

B. Selman and H. Kautz. "Knowledge compilation and theory approximation." Journal of the ACM, 43(2):193-224, 1996.

J. E. Stoy. Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977.

X. Tu. Artificial Animals for Computer Animation: Biomechanics, Locomotion, Perception, and Behavior. ACM Distinguished Ph.D Dissertation Series, Springer-Verlag, 1999.

John Funge recently joined a research group at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) that investigates software issues related to the PlayStation. Previously John was a member of Intel's microcomputer research lab. He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from King's College London in 1990, an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Oxford University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1997. For his Ph.D. John successfully developed a new approach to high-level control of characters in games and animation. John is the author of numerous technical papers and his new book "AI for Games and Animation: A Cognitive Modeling Approach" is one of the first to take a serious look at AI techniques in the context of computer games and animation. His current research interests include computer animation, computer games, smart networked devices, interval arithmetic and knowledge representation.

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