Folks who follow the monthly reports get most of their AI updates there. In five minutes or less, what is Subsumption?

So basically, when I joined the company, Tony Zurovec had this speech for this architecture of AI where there is a little bit of separation between what we want to do at high fidelity, what we want to do in a simulation state, and so on. And Subsumption is the name he gave to this architecture. What it actually turns out to be in reality is a combination of stuff. When we say Subsumption, I think it's always very broad, because it contains both something that in regular AI development you would call, for example, behavior trees, or activities or behaviors from the actor perspective, the AI agents. Then we also include stuff like mission logic. I think we can talk about what it is at an AI level and an architecture level and what it is on the implementation side. So I think what Subsumption wants to do is model the world in a way in which it becomes believable and realistic. How you do that is with a combination of things, because in reality, when you do game development especially, the AI is a big chunk of the experience that you have, but also it's not something you can see in isolation. AI is the output of the work that all the teams do, and there is a really large multidisciplinary effort into making AI look good. People sometimes think it's a bit of magic, there's a behavior running, and then that's it. But AI is, first of all, a lot of animations, because animation is the way in which we convey what actually is happening behind the scenes. The same is voice, what they say. In reality, the smartness of people, and why we consider ourselves smart, is because we can express our thoughts. And how do we do that? With language, which is a construct that we make to express feelings and ideas. And AI, in a way, needs to model this concept, but also make sure that whoever experiences it understands what they're doing. Because my classic example is, you might have combat AI that is great, and it's moving behind covers. You don't even see it. It pops up behind you, and it kills you. The feeling you have is that they're cheating, even if they're not cheating, because it's not fun to play against it. So I think we always have to balance between having the right tools to describe what the AI does, what the world does, what the AI is supposed to do, and then making sure that what we describe translates into something that the players can actually perceive as smart, but also fun and also understandable. So Subsumption is basically the architecture that tries to achieve this, from multiple directions, and it tries to expose this sort of language to multiple departments in a way in which they can really perform their duties, basically.