AIseek was founded in 2004 to develop “innovative technologies to power tomorrow’s computer games.” The company has received funding from Maayan Ventures, and consists of a core team of 16 hardware, software and game experts.

Computer games represent a $30 billion annual market, shared by games software and hardware. The PC “enthusiast” segment is estimated at around 3-5 million users worldwide. Today’s graphics cards account for 25%-30% of a high-end PC, and the annual revenue of the leading graphics processor companies (NVIDIA and ATI) is approaching $5 billion.

The goal of game “artificial intelligence” (AI) can be summed up as “creating a believable illusion of intelligence.” The presence and behavior of computer-controlled “non-player characters” (NPCs) is critical to this illusion, and is the domain of AI. For example, the hundreds of soldiers in an enemy army, or the many individuals populating a virtual city, must all move and behave intelligently.

In the gaming world, advances in graphics quality and physical effects have not been matched by a similar increase in the sophistication and believability of AI. Today’s games compromise severely on the extent and quality of their AI, so as to avoid impacting other aspects of game performance, because the calculations required for good AI are extremely CPU-intensive. Because of this, the vision of a “living, breathing” world where thousands of NPCs move and act intelligently at all times, within a large, constantly changing environment has yet to be realized.

The AI acceleration technology developed by AIseek addresses this fundamental challenge. Whereas graphic chips off-load CPU-intensive graphical computations to dedicated hardware, AI acceleration does the same for the CPU-intensive computations of artificial intelligence.

By accelerating CPU-intensive, low-level AI routines, AIseek frees developers to create sophisticated, higher-level AI on a massive scale. Moreover, with accelerated AI, game worlds can be large, complex and constantly changing, without compromising on the number or intelligence of the NPCs inhabiting those worlds.

The company’s flagship product, the Intia processor, is claimed to be the first dedicated processor for AI. Computationally, AI problems are typically search-intensive, translating into large graphs with a high degree of branching. The Intia processor tackles these specific processing challenges with a technological breakthrough, the Graph Processing Core (GPC), which delivers fast and optimal solutions to graph-based computations.

The Intia processor accelerates low-level AI tasks, including movement (pathfinding and group movement), sensory simulation (line-of-sight) and terrain analysis, which constitute necessary “building blocks” that underlie high-level AI. For pathfinding, the processing time for each 100 nodes of path depth is only 10µs, making the Intia processor about 100-200 times faster than a comparable software solution. Unlike today’s software-based approaches (e.g., A*), the Intia’s pathfinding uses no heuristics, thereby guaranteeing that the optimal path will always be found. For line-of-sight calculation, the Intia’s checks are several orders of magnitude faster than current software methods. Advanced terrain analysis capabilities enable real-time truly adaptive decision making capabilities.

By eliminating the CPU bottleneck associated with low-level AI, and accelerating and optimizing behavioral computations, the Intia processor empowers developers to create more intelligent characters and more believable game worlds.

AI-intense genres, such as RTS, RPG and Action/Shooters, will benefit most from accelerated AI. RTS worlds can be large, complex and highly dynamic, with thousands of AI-controlled units moving and behaving intelligently at all times. In RPG games, cities and landscapes can come alive with thousands of fully-simulated characters. For Action games and Shooters, accelerated AI means no more dumb enemies.

AIseek is partnering with studios, publishers, middleware developers, and hardware manufacturers.

Uri Kareev, CEO