Éric Jacopin

Éric Jacopin discovered Mathematica during his first-year doctorate internship at the Stanford University Robotics Laboratory in April 1989. He then used fractal geometry to analyze search data generated from AI symbolic planners (1994–2001). During his 24-year tenure at the French Military Academy of Saint-Cyr, he used Mathematica for various courses, including one on Turing machines, which was published (2009) as a book. Following the first use of an AI planner in a commercial video game (F.E.A.R. 2005) to control the behavior of non-player characters (NPCs) and benefiting from the knowledge accumulated on analyzing planning search data, in 2010 he began development of the Game AI Planning Analytics Package (PAP) to process in-game planning data generated by studios, for statistical debugging purposes and the computation of the entropy of in-game planning. Since then, the planning of NPC-behaviors of a dozen AAA games has been carried out in an industrial setting; PAP and its functionality are still being improved.

Jacopin has taught various algorithmic, object-oriented and functional languages at various levels, from college to master, and in engineering school. As of September 2022, he works as a senior AI programmer for a video game studio where he regularly uses Mathematica to prototype solutions for complex geometrical problems arising in highly dynamic path planning.