AI

There is a Variety of approaches to give AI in games an edge to combat the player.

Introduction to AI in Games

AI Foundations

AI Decision Making
There are quiet a few ways to handle AI Decision Making the most common are Finite State Machines, Behavior Trees, and Hierarchical Task Network Planning.

Finite State Machines
Finite State Machines (FSM) have nodes that dictate AI Behavior, with State transitions that conditionally check when The AI should move to a new node.

Hierarchical State Machines
Hierarchical Finite State Machines (HFSM), are very similar, except they have larger groups that are isolated from the the other nodes so that managing a ton of nodes becomes easier. HFSM's have transitions between these larger grouping. Allowing for much more organization, and complex State Machines.

Machine Learning
The self learning Computer, gets a lot of press on the internet generally a bad idea for Game AI. It doesn't usually solve the problems game AI programmers are trying to solve.