Despite the remarkable improvements over the past decade in gaming artificial intelligence (AI), it's still rather crude compared to audio and video support. It also tends to be very customized. But, don't expect this to change much during the next couple of years. If per chance it does, then hardware acceleration of AI likely will become an important addition to gaming system support.
Gaming AI already provides rather intelligent opponents. It also can reduce micromanagement chores by making sidekicks, pets, and other entities react in a more intelligent, unscripted fashion. Likewise, the environment can be made more interesting by making entities like birds more realisitic through the use of flocking algorithms.
AI support gains greater importance if the player's environment becomes more interactive. Initially, games attempted to provide variability through the use of rather rigid event/action interactions.
Related technologies such as voice recognition, sentence decomposition, and expert systems could potentially benefit from AI hardware support. As with physics and even graphics, a standard API and hardware platform will make game creation easier by reducing the amount of expertise a programming team must possess when creating a game.
