There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.

In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.

Their weapon of choice - the algorithm.

Eve Online's players are a notoriously dedicated, and vociferous, bunch. Self-governing, focused and regularly taking part in huge interstellar fleet battles, meeting their expectations presents a daunting challenge to any AI programmer. We sat down with CCP Games senior programmer, Joel McGinnis, to discuss the difference between real and observed artificial intelligence, why MMOG developer's tend to push AI to the bottom of the to-do list and what we can expect from game AI in the future.

While computers have provided us with an amazing array of game titles that have grown and improved over the decades since the game industry’s inception, even today no computer program can compare to the creativity and the level of interactivity of a human dungeon master.

But Watson has opened up a new frontier for computers, a frontier that has the ability to understand situations and create environments that respond as a human dungeon master would. Watson’s successors have the potential to provide the kind of computing that game designers have always dreamed of, a computer that can understand what players are trying to do and play along with them.