Make games smarter: Attend the GDC 2018 AI Summit!

The 2018 Game Developers Conference is coming up fast, and organizers are eager to let you know about some of the great AI-focused talks that will be taking place during the March conference.

Each of these talks is part of the GDC AI Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, March 19th and Tuesday, March 20th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA during the first two days of the conference.

Each Summit offers a comprehensive overview of a specific game industry discipline, and the AI Summit is no exception. This year, for example, Guerrilla Games' Julian Berteling will be delivering a very cool talk on "Beyond 'Killzone': Creating New AI Systems for 'Horizon Zero Dawn'" to explain the changes that Guerilla made to switch from having to support a single human enemy in closed corridor spaces to a game with more than 25 wildly different characters in a large open world.

You'll want to see this, because attendees will learn ways of dealing with an expanding scope of AI, either throughout a single title’s production or when moving to a new title. Additionally, attendees will understand concrete methods for dealing with navigation, movement, and animation for open world titles with many, widely varied agents.

And in her Summit session on "'Race for the Galaxy': A Neural Network in Production" Temple Gate chief Theresa Duringer will explain how the studio's game Race for the Galaxy (a digital adaptation of the board game) uses temporal difference learning to power its AI.

This knowledge-free system requires no human input to generate training data, which allows it to improve by playing against itself. Through this approach, the Temple Gate Games team was evidently able to dramatically improve the challenge level offered by AI opponents without the significant time investment typical of tuning complex AI.

Plus, in "The "Freak-O-System": The Dynamic Open World of Sony's 'Days Gone'" Sony Bend's Darren Chisum and Tobias Karlsson will give you an overview at the AI and gameplay components used to create the dynamic and interactive open world of the studio's upcoming post-apocalyptic game Days Gone.

They'll cover some of the different AI units, and how they interact with one another in the "Freak-O-System". They'll also go into detail on how the human AI units form squads, and calculate a Front Line to help define the combat area, and choose tactical locations -- the squads are evidently themselves a type of AI entity, and can identify situations, based on unit and squad Confidence, and assign Roles to each unit.

It promises to be fascinating, so don't miss out! For more details on these and all other announced talks head over to the online GDC 2018 Session Scheduler.

And of course conference officials look forward to announcing many more GDC 2018 sessions spanning a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead. For now, don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering for the conference early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is tomorrow -- Wednesday, March 31st!

For more information on GDC 2018, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.