high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Artificial intelligence (AI) is generally considered to be one of the key components of a computer game. Sometimes when we play a game, we may wish that the computer opponents were written better. At those times while playing against the computer, we feel that the game is unbalanced. Perhaps the computer player has been given different set of rules, or uses the same rules, but has more resources (health, weapons, etc.). The complexity of underlying AI systems, along with game design, belies the resulting feeling we have when playing any game. As the CPU and GPU speed and power continues to grow, along with increasing memory amounts and bandwidth, game developers are constantly improving the graphics of their games. In the last five years the production quality of games has been increasing (along with the corresponding budgets). Recent games woo players with incredible breakthroughs in real- time 3D graphics, complexity of the worlds and characters, as well as various post-processing effects. And while there had been tremendous improvements for parallelizing rendering through the evolution of consumer GPU pipelines, artificial intelligence computations are treading behind. To date, there had been rather few attempts at parallelizing AI computations.