I think the ability to use similar ‘planning’ algorithms for walking through a room, choosing an option for attack/defend/use item, which enemy to target, may account for some of the attribution of intelligence to game AI. Humans seem to think they and other humans put as much thought and think in similar patterns about wildly dissimilar activities like planning a route or weighting risk/reward or planning an event 6 months out. So the ability to encode a wide variety of ‘search space’ into an appropriate graph for use with a common algorithm lends a perceived verisimilitude to the AI’s thoughtfulness and near-personhood when immersed in play.
