Inside IT: The hard-thought race for intelligent gaming

Gaming has a lot in common with everyone's favourite heiress, at least in the public consciousness: it's pretty, but dumb. And now that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony have released their latest games consoles, that statement becomes all the more pertinent - next-gen games look great, but they play like something that could have been made a decade ago. While visual fidelity has advanced exponentially over time, the technology that governs how games play, react and adapt - the artificial intelligence, or AI - remains relatively rudimentary. A handful of developers are striving to change this. The British designer Peter Molyneux, recently awarded an OBE, has spent his career trying to inject sentience and reactivity into games - and with his upcoming title, Fable 2, he thinks he's made significant progress.