AI, or artificial intelligence, gives non-playable characters the ability to make decisions based on partial information ( i.e. find cover when shot at). This has been one of the most difficult things to program into games properly and why we sometimes wind up with games whose enemies tend to line up like a target gallery.

Many believe now that AI is more important than graphics, Sony's UK boss Ray Maguire among them. According to him "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."

Considering the aforementioned difficulty of programming AI is has often taken a back seat to the pretty pictures. Magrire, however, says to forget graphics as the future of video games and look to competent AI, which can be possible now with the PS3's processing power. Progress is made steadily on this and eventually we could see game AI that can react as humans and develop gameplays that are as intuitive as humans.

The University Of Alberta's Jonathan Shaeffer, head of the Computer Science Department, says programming good AI can involve a lot of guesswork. Still, if graphics have come as far as they can it could be time to look elsewhere for improvement.