The Catch for Multi-threading Decision Making
Contract-based developer Alex J. Champandard runs the AiGameDev.com site and blog, excellent resources for game makers working in the artificial intelligence space. The site is regularly updated with posts, Q&As, videos, and other features centering around AI.
Some of the content is directly related to multithreading and even Intel in particular, as numerous articles deal with the ins and outs of multithreading AI-related tasks, and examples frequently make use of Intel's threaded building blocks C++ library.
For example, The Catch for Multi-threading Decision Making contains a video Q&A with Champandard addressing the notion of dedicating processor cores specifically to AI.
"It's harder to throw processing power at the problem than you realize," he offers. "It's easier to throw, let's say, many more animations and more behaviors, but you don't necessarily have a linear growth in computation when you have more assets; you will structure them in such a way that your decision-making is always not linear. If you have N behaviors, you have to make sure your decision-making is not [in] order N, but has some structure to it, so when all these behaviors need to be selected, you're going to do that in a scalable way. ...Processing power is not something you use linearly."
As well as going further in-depth into that topic with visual aids, the post also follows a practical primer called Hierarchical Logic and Multi-threaded Game AI, and links to a feature on Multi-threading a Simple Hierarchical Planner to Estimate Performance (note that that piece requires registration on the site, which is free).
