Artificial Intelligence in any program connotes the ability to make decisions from partial information. Many believers agree that graphics don't count as much as AI anymore and one of them is Sony Computer Entertainment's (SCE) UK boss, Ray Maguire, who lets out a quip on how powerful the PS3's CELL processor is.

"The CELL chip is so powerful it can do 256 million calculations per second...That means one thing for us in the videogames industry: artificial intelligence."

True enough, in games like chess and poker, this revelation is apparent, but we're a bit wary of this, since video games are so difficult to program that building an impressive AI system seems to take the backseat as compared to making drop-dead gorgeous graphics.

However, Maguire says to forget the graphics as the future of video games depend on convincing and competent AI, something that the PS3's GPU can handle. Advancements in this field have been continually progressing, and the ultimate goal is to be able to program game AI that can act like humans, as well as develop gameplays that are as intuitive as human-populated games could be.

A point of interest would be the question of how long reaching this goal will take, as Jonathan Schaeffer, head of the University of Alberta's Computer Science Department have once told us that AI can be a real guesswork. Still, if fantastic graphics no longer pose much of a challenge to programmers and designers, then the next field to turn to is already obvious.