AI Acceleration On The Horizon?

We've had GPU's and audio accelerators for many years on the PC, and recently physics and consumer-level network processing units from Ageia and Bigfoot Networks have been in the news. And now there's a new accelerator generating some buzz, the Intia AI accelerator from AISeek. AI Acceleration was discussed at this year's GDC and the company seems to already have preliminary hardware:

Here is a quote taken from the AISeek website that somewhat illustrates the company's vision...

"Game technology is continuously evolving to help developers build better games. Unfortunately, recent advances in graphics quality and physical effects have not been matched by a similar increase in the sophistication and believability of artificial intelligence (AI). In the words of one leading developer, "characters still act like cardboard cut-outs". Indeed, the vision of a "living, breathing" world is yet to be fulfilled - a world where thousands of non-player characters (NPCs) move and act intelligently at all times, within a large, constantly changing environment. The AI acceleration technology developed by AIseek addresses this fundamental challenge. By accelerating CPU-intensive, low-level AI routines, AIseek frees developers to create sophisticated, higher-level AI on a massive scale. Moreover, with accelerated AI, game worlds can be large, complex and constantly changing - without compromising on the number or intelligence of the NPCs inhabiting those worlds."

There are some demos and an FAQ posted up on the site for those seeking more information. The demos page in particular has some good explanations and descriptions as to what's happening in each demo video.  This article, however, written by the CEO of AISeek (Uri Kareev) has some interesting information about the technology.

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