Chapter 5

Agent Reaction Time

How Fast Should an AI React?

Steve Rabin

5.1 Introduction

Modeling human behavior is a core aspect of game AI, which raises a very simple, yet important question: How fast should an enemy AI react to seeing the player?

Like many questions concerning human behavior, it is difficult to answer precisely and largely depends on context. Researchers have investigated human response time for over 100 years, trying to time the inner workings of the brain in an area of study known as mental chronometry [Posner 05].

However, if you want the quick and dirty answer to what should be used for an AI’s reaction time, then let’s just spill the beans. It’s somewhere between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds, possibly longer depending on context. ...

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