Chapter 11
Sharing Knowledge and Results on a Blackboard
In This Chapter
- Solving nondeterministic problems
- Letting expert knowledge sources work independently on the same problem
- Implementing a blackboard system
The Blackboard pattern has been used in the artificial intelligence (AI) community since the 1970s. This pattern is useful to give structure to the analysis of problems that don't have a deterministic solution — in other words, for solving a problem when you can't define a straight-line approach to the solution. The blackboard architecture provides a way to receive the input from multiple knowledge sources (KSes) and combine the inputs, build upon them, and synthesize all the information to achieve a goal.
In recent years, this pattern has found renewed life in game design, so this chapter discusses the Blackboard pattern as you might use it in a strategy game.
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