Steven Tattersall's personal blog
Created on: 2002-11-26
PopSci report, sloppily, on the Lord of the Rings crowd simulation:
In another early simulation, Jackson and Regelous watched as several thousand characters fought like hell while, in the background, a small contingent of combatants seemed to think better of it and run away. They weren't programmed to do this. It just happened. "It was spooky," Jackson said in an interview last year.
If they weren't programmed to do this, how did they do it?
The more I work in AI for games like Cambridge's, the more I realise how divorced from other AI it really is. Although we have tried systems like this in the past, the more accurately you model reality, the more the games designer wants to throttle you