Machine Learning

Games and simulations are no stranger to AI technologies and there are numerous assets available to the Unity developer in order to provide simulated machine intelligence. These technologies include content like Behavior Trees, Finite State Machine, navigation meshes, A*, and other heuristic ways game developers use to simulate intelligence. So, why Machine Learning and why now? After all, many of the base ML techniques, like neural nets, we will use later in this book have been used in games before. 

The reason, is due in large part to the OpenAI initiative, an initiative that encourages research across academia and the industry to share ideas and research on AI and ML. This has resulted in an explosion of growth in new ideas, methods, and areas for research. This means for games and simulations that we no longer have to fake or simulate intelligence. Now, we can build agents that learn from their environment and even learn to beat their human builders.