It’s been taking me a bit longer than planned to get around to writing up my notes from AIIDE. I’ll just list out who spoke and see if I can’t get around to filling in the ones people are most interested in hearing about. So leave a comment if you want to know what someone talked about! And probably do it soon before I forget everything I heard. Hehe. Kidding! I took notes!
Wednesday:
- Richard Evans from EA/Maxis talking about Sims 3
- Quinn Dunki from Pandemic talking about pathfinding in Saboteur
- Chris Williams, Nick Pavis, Matthew Best and Steve Dykes talking about Euphoria technology from LucasArts (I won’t write this one up since it’s where I work! Conflict of interest and all)
- Ken Perlin talking about all sorts of interesting stuff
Thursday:
- Matthew Wiggins from Lionhead talking about character and emotion in Fable 2
- Wolff Dobson from AiLive talking about their LiveMove and LiveCombat products
- Peter Gorniak from Mad Doc Software talking about Squad planning in a tactical shooter (yes, I used to work at Mad Doc, but I’ll talk about this one if people are curious)
- Chris Hecker from EA/Maxis talking about approaching hard problems - not really about Spore
Friday:
- Neil Young from EALA talking about various AI in different games, including the Spielberg titles
- Soren Johnson talking about Civilization IV (he was at Firaxis but is now at EA/Maxis)
Just about all my notes are from invited talks. The only one I could really write up that was from a paper submission is Peter’s talk, above. I have a few notes on some work done at the University of Alberta on memory efficient pathfinding that is being used in Bioware’s Dragon Age, but the most interesting thing about my notes is really the fact that the game is still in development, since there’s been nothing about it released in quite some time.
The final item at the conference was a presentation about this annual RTS competition. If you’re interested in RTS AI problems then I recommend checking out their webpage since it’s all open source and you can download their engine and all the competitors to try to build your own solution.
2 Responses to “AIIDE 2007: Speaker Line-up”
Hi Tara, how’s it going? Found your web-site! I’d like to hear some about Richard Evans talk, if you don’t mind. Ironically, he gave the same talk here on-site for the Spore team, but I had to miss that one too because I had to leave early for the Police concert!
I’ll try to see what I can remember! I’ll drag out my notes and write something up really soon.