Parallel Computation in Game AI

The goal of this project is to develop parallelised versions of AI techniques and to explore the potential of these techniques within interactive games in particular in the existing Jomini Engine, a historical Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG's). We will implement parallel versions of AI search algorithms, initially based on established sequential algorithms and later exploring novel parallel algorithms particularly suited for this application domain. We will analyse and identify performance differences between each version and reasons for the variation in performance. The main metric of success will be the (absolute) speedup achieved on large-scale parallel machines, such as clusters or GPUs, and the suitability of the results in the context of a concrete game engine, such as guaranteed response time from an AI-controlled agent. In the next phase of the project we will explore different parallel programming technologies, as MPI, OpenMP and OpenCL, and different sequential host languages, such as C/C++ & C#;, to finalise the infrastructure for the main part of this research in the area of parallel programming for (interactive) games.