The Workshop on AI in Games AIG-08 is targeted to both academic researchers and practitioners that actively try to use new technologies in game development. The event continues previous efforts to bridge the gap between the two communities.

From an academic perspective, games are an excellent testbed for many AI fields. Puzzles and board games are typical applications of areas such as heuristic search and learning. Video games contain a large diversity of domains for both single-agent and multi-agent problems. They may or may not include features such as uncertainty, dynamic environments, and hidden information. New ideas in fields such as planning, search and learning can be developed and tested using a game environment as a testbed.

On the practical side, games are a booming, multi-billion dollar industry. Recent years have seen an increasing focus on making the inhabitants of a game world smarter. The quality of a game is directly impacted by character skills such as navigating on a map, acting according to a meaningful plan, and learning from previous experience, which need to be implemented using AI algorithms.