There was a brief and oblique mention of the course in a news article published today about UCSC's new video game design major.

The course CMPS 146 - Game AI is now finished. On the evaluations, over 90% of the students who responded said that the course was either a "very good" or "excellent" learning experience. You might be interested to see some of the student projects that were completed as part of the course. All of the projects used the companion source code for the book as their starting point.

Today I gave the first lecture of a new course called CMPS 146 - Game AI that I proposed, designed and am teaching at the University of California Santa Cruz. The course is based on the book and is one of the first of its kind to be given at a major research university.

The book is featured on the Forum Winter 2005 Reading List and was briefly mentioned on NPR by Michael Crazny during the popular Forum radio broadcast.

In today's edition of The Hollywood Reporter, there is an article by Paul Hyman that includes an interview he did with me. GameDAILY also picked up the story.

A second review of the book appeared on Slashdot today! Given the relatively limited number of book reviews on Slashdot, I'm surprised they accepted more than one review for the same book.

Version 1.0.0 of the source code for the book was released today. See the release notes for more details.

In this week's Polish edition of PSX Extreme, there is an article by Mariusz Ludwinski that includes a review of the book and an interview he did with me. The original article is obviously in Polish, but Mariusz was kind enough to send me a translation.

I will be at GDC from 3:30pm to 4:30pm, or so, signing books at a "meet the author" event organized by A K Peters at their booth 962.

A review of the book by Craig Reynold's appeared on Slashdot. Within a few hours, the Slashdot Effect resulted in about 8,000 hits to this web site and for the book to reach around 300 in the Amazon sales ranking.

An excerpt of Chapter 3: Perceiving is available from Gamasutra.

My publisher's lawyer reassures me that (as you might hope and suspect) the CPL doesn't have a leg to stand on, not even a "cyber" one! Firstly, I do not impinge on the territories in which they own the trademark and secondly, I am using the term in a purely descriptive sense, which is not a trademark use and hence not a trademark infringement. The lawyer cojectured that, if it is not already, the CPL's trademark is in great danger of becoming generic and they are desperately trying to forestall the inevitable.

I also noticed that in the original LaTeX source, I hyphenated the term "cyber-athlete", but in the book it falls on a line break and so the hyphenation is ambiguous.

On page 72 of the book, in what is meant to be an amusing turn of phrase, I use the term "cyber-athlete" in the following sentence: "The full power of being able to predict the current game-state from past information is illustrated by the prowess of the well-known cyber-athlete Thresh. " I was surprised to receive an email from a representative of the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) informing me that the term "cyberathlete" is trademarked and that: "The term Cyberathlete should be used as an adjective, followed by an appropriate generic term - as a brand name would be used, not as a reference to a player. It should also refer specifically to the Cyberathlete Professional League." They also included the following request: "The CPL requests that you review the information we provide on our trademark so that you will either use the mark appropriately in reference to the CPL, or cease its use entirely."

The book is also now available for ordering from Amazon.

The book is now available from Barnes & Noble

I received an advanced copy this morning and it looks pretty good!

The book is due to be published on July 15, 2004. In the meantime you can visit the companion web site ai4games.org. The web site contains information about the contents of the book and links to relevant online resources.