One day, a day much like today, I was sitting at my desk poking around online when the phone rings. It was my good friend Mike McShaffry. He reminded me of a conversation we had earlier that year the Game Developer's Conference where I mentioned in passing that I'd be interested in writing a chapter on Artificial Intelligence for his book if he ever made a 3rd edition. Well, he was calling to collect on that promise. I'll be honest with you, I had no idea what I was getting into. It took me 3 - 4 days to write the code for my section and 28 hours straight to write the text. That's right, I stayed up for 28 hours without moving from the computer to finish that chapter. It was pretty rough but I had a great time and I'd do it all over again. I told Mike to call me as soon as he wants to make a 4th edition!

My chapter is Chapter 17: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. The main topics I cover are A* based pathing and state machines. I go into detail on how to implement the code for these systems and then talk about some more advanced concepts, like fuzzy logic and decision trees.