Customer Reviews

AI Agents in Virtual Reality Worlds: Programming Intelligent VR in C++

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The AI techniques presented were overly simplistic, and the examples were somewhere near useless(especially when they were supposed to be geared towards agent intelligence). The VR section seemed to be missing. There was a simplistic 3D app in OpenGL, but no discussion on agents using upper(or lower for that matter) level AI to interact in a VR environ. Save your money.

The author wastes about half of the book with code dumps and oversized diagrams. He barely attempts to explain the theory, which is crammed into one chapter. The examples are useless and get little explanation.

This book takes about 2 hours to breeze through. The author spends about as much time on how to write OOP code as he does the AI concepts. If I wanted lessons in OOP, I'd buy a book about OOP. This book was supposed to be about AI! Also, he spends very little time explaining the theory of ai. Statements like "It does not make sense to use crossover operations to evolve the population for recurrent neural networks" are never qualified with an explanation. The reader never gets a sense of why he should be doing what the author describes. Rather than explain anything, the author just sites his other publications. Very poor. This is the real kicker: practically half of the book is dedicated to code dumps or space wasting Booch diagrams. The code dumps aren't even accompanied by anything meaningful, just things like, the constructor initializes the data. If I wanted to see the code in print, I'll use my own printer, thank you.

The good points:

Clear, solid code, including unit test, integration test, class diagrams, comments. Code for Windows, Mac, and Unix. Both of these qualities are such a rarity in programming books, I'd be tempted to recommend the book just on principle.

The bad points:

The AIs presented aren't "deluxe" -- they work OK, but there's no bells and whistles here. The title is clearly designed to get a lot of "hits" in web searches.

The redeeming values:

If you know C++ (at least a little) you can read this book and produce a pretty good AI. Or you can just pop in the CD and see what the AIs do, no programming required. No nonsense or stupid programmer jokes, no pretense, just good code, VERY well presented.