Intelligent Adventures For The Electron And Bbc Microcomputers
McGraw Hill

Adventures and artificial intelligence

"This book is about the intelligence of computers, and about the intelligence of people who play computer games. On the one hand, it aims to show some of the basics of artificial intelligence and how it can be used in games. On the other it shows you how you can go about writing games that require some intelligence to play. Of course, the two things go together."

This is how Noel Williams introduces his book. Writing a good adventure game is by no means a trivial job, and using some of the most recent techniques, it can form an ideal introduction to artificial intelligence - the design of a program that makes the computer appear to react intelligently, learning from past mistakes. The book assumes a knowledge of BBC Basic, implemented on the Electron or on the BBC Micro. All aspects of the design and writing of an adventure game are covered, including techniques of data compaction, sentence processing, and semantic databases.

As a final illustration of the techniques described, there is a listing of a full-sized 81-room adventure, The Opal Lily, occupying practically all of the Electron RAM. Other illustrations - with full listings - are Mernar Keep (a simulation/war game) and Dilemma, an original computer board game.

For the serious Electron or BBC Micro programmer, games writer, or student of artificial intelligence, this book is a 'must'!

You obviously know something about intelligence because you just done a highly intelligent thing - you began to read this book.