Sudoku is a popular puzzle in Japan (su is number, doku is place), to where it was imported from the U.S. It was popularized in the West by Wayne Gould, a New Zealander living in Hong Kong. […] In a November 2004 article in the Times, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0„18209-1354181,00.html, Gould was quoted as saying that some Sudoku puzzles are so difficult that you can’t solve them if your life depended on it.

An MMORPG project is challenging for any development team, let alone a distributed team of “amateur” volunteers. This talk will explore the internal design of the FOSS MMO project called PlaneShift, and how that design was influenced by the strengths and weaknesses of the team structure and the community. Topics will include server design, network topology, NPC AI and management and player security, among others.

With Gears of War 2 complete and releasing next month, Gamasutra sat down with Bleszinski to discuss his development process, the divide between games and Hollywood, the role of a designer in modern game development, and why as a well-known personality it’s important to pick your battles.

There is a psychological concept known as groupthink, where members of a group discussing a topic gravitate towards a consensus based on a desire to minimize conflict rather than rationally discussing the subject. The play and film 12 Angry Men is a famous view of groupthink in action. A jury must decide whether a man is guilty or innocent, and the general group consensus is that he is guilty. But one juror refuses to ignore his intuition, even though it differs from the other jurors. The drama of the film is primarily based on how the other 11 jurors come to change their minds and eventually find the man innocent. Groupthink is a dangerous phenomenon because it can cause rational people to make irrational choices purely because it is the most common choice made by other group members. Just because a decision is right for everyone else in the group doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

The game’s AI is simply dreadful. Path finding is horrendous, and if you are escorting several survivors that are wielding weapons (either melee or firearm) they will have no moral qualm about hitting you or other survivors. Several times I had survivors accidentally killing other survivors that were low on health.

Survivors aren’t satisfied with you bringing them to the security room. Occasionally, a few decide they want more out of you (such as food, alcohol, or even wanting to leave the mall and go for help). If you ignore them, they will seek these things on their own. Due to their own ineptitude, they will die.

Saarbrücken, Germany (PRWEB) October 23, 2008 — xaitment GmbH, one of the leading developers and service providers of artificial intelligence for the games and simulation industries, announced today that they have partnered with Swiss game developer, GIANTS Software GmbH, to incorporate artificial intelligence into their upcoming business simulation game, Farmer Simulator 2009. The game will be published by astragon Software GmbH and will be available in April 2009.

“What I can say about the AI more than anything else is that, for sure, it doesn’t cheat — guaranteed,” he said. “One of the cool things about the way this game works is it there is a sort of randomness. The way the puzzles pieces come on the board at the beginning of the battle is random — it’s like a roulette wheel or something like that. The logic of how the pieces come together doesn’t always favor the enemy or the player; sometimes it favors you and sometimes it favors the AI.”

Well, the conference is over, and I think each day was more enjoyable then the last. Big thanks to Michael Mateas and Chris Darken and the organizers for setting it up.

My largest issue with the game was the AI. There was just far too many times that for no reason a civilian would swerve and run into me. The worst of these was when I was defending a building and a van that did not belong to any gang and was simply a civilian drove up two sets of stairs just to run me over. This erratic AI behavior although frustrating, never really broke the experience for me.