After reading the article, I feel pretty good about myself I have for all intents and purposes zero knowledge about AI systems, and yet virtually everything Philip introduced in that article is something that I''ve thought and have discussed in posts here on the forum. He even uses some terminology like I do, like Plan of Action, and covers things that worry me like the Priority of an order. His "Thoughts" and "Strategies" relate directly to my notions of Goals and Orders. I even grappled with the notion of individual units (the soldiers) dealing with a Rules of Engagement (ROE) which is a state machine generated by the Plan of Action, whereas the Commander himself has to deal with higher level concepts than this. I don''t post on this forum often, as I mostly frequent the Game Design forum, but do a search on my nick and read through some of my posts to get an understanding of my game design if you aren''t familiar with my posts from the Design forum. While the article deals with Squad level tactics, this can easily be extrapolated out to strategic level games. This is the quandry I''m in...trying to create a nested AI system that has individual units, groups of units, and the Commanders that tell them what to do (with input from the player). I hope he goes more into actually integrating each AI system with the Blackboard system he describes, because so far, I have conceptually thought about all the elements he describes, but I don''t know how to tie them all together. I''d be much obliged if someone could enlighten how this could be done before the next installment in his article.

it sounds intriguing.
seeing that i don''t know anything about AI myself. i would be interested in reading it... if you had a link