Call For Proposals: AI Game Programming Wisdom 4
From IntroGameDev.com:
Once again Charles River Media and series editor Steve Rabin are looking for game developers to share their wisdom in the next brand new volume of the groundbreaking AI Game Programming Wisdom series. Anything that an AI game programmer would typically deal with is fair game, including pathfinding, AI architecture, animation control, scripting, learning, and various decision-making techniques. Selected authors will have several months to write and will share in a portion of the book’s royalties. Proposals for 8-20 page articles are now being accepted until March 31st.
For those of you who are in a position to contribute to this volume, here’s your chance :). I have a copy of the first book in this series, and I have to say that it is a very useful and impressive volume. It’s not the type of book that you would read from cover to cover. Instead you are presented with a series of focused articles that deal with cutting-edge game AI techniques. It’s more of an encyclopedia/cookbook than a textbook. Emphasis is on depth than on breadth, and this can prove to be very useful if you’re trying to solve a very specific problem that’s actually already covered in the book.
Maybe I’ll try to contribute in AI Wisdom 5. 
I’m particularly interested in the racing articles provided by the series, and I thought that the articles contained in AI Wisdom 1 are all top-notch. I find Euan Forrester’s Intelligent Steering Using PID Controllers (contained in AI Wisdom 2) article very interesting - probably, the information contained in this article will be especially relevant to today’s games, because game AI would have to be designed to consider the underlying physics engine. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of AI Wisdom 2 YET. Hopefully, I’ll have access to this article soon and hopefully write a follow-up to it - I did some work with optimal control theory as an undergraduate and I’m thrilled at the possibility of applying it to (hopefully cutting-edge) game development!
Of course, if you find the above interesting as well, go ahead and write about it. I would love to read the result, and hopefully build upon that work eventually.
Be sure to read the guidelines before submitting your proposal. Now go work on those articles! There are royalties to be earned! 
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Hey, if you enjoy my article in AI Wisdom 2, you should also take a look at the one is AI Wisdom 3 about making these control systems adaptive to make them easier to tune.
I don’t know much about optimal control theory, but I suspect that it’s somewhat different than the stuff in the articles: the theory seems to be about deriving precise control systems from scratch, whereas the articles are more about fiddling with numbers until it seems to work :).
And, yeah, if you’re thinking about writing for the series, you should give it a go! It’s definitely rewarding, and I would be super interested to read a followup to these articles!
April 6th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Thank you so much for the encouragement, Euan! Yes, I will definitely give it a go, although not anytime soon
Perhaps I’ll try to finish some projects first which may need optimal control in order to have a good idea of what will actually be useful in the real world.
Thank you also for pointing me to the article in AI Wisdom 3 - hopefully I’ll be able to read it soon.
Thanks for dropping by!