Pong game AI
 

Ok, so I am making a mini pong arcade game. Currently the ball bounces off walls and players and restarts when it goes behind the player- basic pong concept; but the enemy AI is too simple,
if the ball's y is less than its, it moves down and well, you know.

How would I make the enemy predict and possibly be wrong where the ball will be?

by the way, the ball doesnt use a direction to move, I have numbers being added or subtracted from the x and y of the ball.

I would use a random variable for the accuracy, and make the y possition either more or less than the ball y by that much, per movement. This would allow it to move twoard the ball, but it may be off, or move too slow.

best AI: paddle.y = ball.y - (paddle.width/2) !!

Thats what I have and the AI never loses. I think Ill try the variable accuracy.

That would screw up because I wasn't thinking. Should be paddleheight :P
anyways, the best way to do AI for pong is to make the paddle at a constant speed, and have it go up at that speed when the ball is higher, and down when the ball is lower, that way it's still possible to score against the AI, but it's not overly easy :P

I made a pong game for Playstation 2, and for the AI I basically said that if the ball is above the paddle, move up, if its below, move down. I then limited the maximum speed at which the paddle could move, so the way to beat it was to hit things at quite a sharp diagonal (so that it cant keep up with tracking), or into the corner opposite from it (so that it cant get there in time).

It worked ok. You could basically vary the difficulty by varying the maximum AI paddle speed. ^^

The maximum speed the opponent can move and the increasing speed of the ball are the two best factors.