In a wacky sort of follow-up to yesterday's Q&A with Graeme Devine, Computer Gaming Review has posted a quick Q&A with Stephen Polge, master of all things AI at Epic Games regarding the bots in Unreal Tournament. Here's a quick excerpt:

I've rewritten most of the bot AI for Unreal Tournament. I was only able to spend a little over a week focused on the Unreal I bots (although they also shared a good bit of their AI with the Unreal I monsters), while I've been able to devote a substantial part of the last 10 months to the Unreal Tournament bots. As a result, I've been able to really tweak and improve them in a lot of areas. Their navigation is much more polished. They feel a lot more human, in terms of how they make decisions about what to do, how they use weapons and inventory items, how they hit or miss targets, and how they have different personalities. Another significant improvement is their vastly improved team AI support. The bots play the Unreal Tournament team games (Assault, Domination, and Capture the Flag) very well. They work together and support each other, as well as changing strategies based on the situation. Players can also give them orders on the fly. The code is also designed so that mod authors will be easily able to extend the AI support for new game types.

I never really enjoyed playing the reaper bots or the Unreal I bots, because I was always too cognizant of their flaws, which really distracted me from the game. I do really enjoy playing against the UT bots.