Artificial Intelligence and Games

Finally with this book by two of the worlds most accomplished experts at the intersection of games and AI, students can benefit from a comprehensive introduction that reaches well beyond the narrow scope of traditional NPC AI ... all this knowledge in a single textbook is truly a milestone for the practice of AI in games and will help to encourage innovation in the area from a new generation of practitioners. (Kenneth O. Stanley, University of Central Florida and Uber AI Labs)

This book provides a thorough overview of AI techniques and their applications in games ... [it] would be a great choice for a game AI class. (Michael Mateas, University of California, Santa Cruz, co-creator of Faade)

Game AI is a vast field of research spanning from locomotion and action planning, to interactive narrative, procedural content generation, computational creativity, and beyond. It's important to finally have an academic textbook that collects current thinking on all of these topics in one place, drawing connections between them ... [the authors] have the intimate familiarity with the field required to weave these disparate topics into a coherent whole. (Jeff Orkin, inventor of Goal-Oriented Action Planning, AI lead of F.E.A.R.)

This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. 

The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.