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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 12 declined, 9 accepted (21 total, 42.86% accepted)

Submission + - AI system invents new card games (for humans) (newscientist.com)

Submitted by jtogel
jtogel writes: This New Scientist article describes our AI system that automatically generates card games. The article contains a description of a playable card game generated by our system. But card games are just the beginning... The card game generator is a part of a larger project to automatise all of game development using artificial intelligence methods — we're also working on level generation for a variety of different games, and on rule generation for simple arcade-like games.

Submission + - New AI challenge is all about wanton destruction (uni-wuerzburg.de)

Submitted by
togelius
togelius writes: "Previous years have seen a number of car racing competitions where neural nets, rule-based systems and other fancy AI techniques have been put to the test by letting them drive on a track and seeing who gets the best lap time. Recognizing that finding the Michael Schumacher of AI is not enough, a team of researchers from University of Wuerzburg now wants to find the Mad Max of AI. Their new competition is called "Demolition Derby" and the goal is to "wreck all opponent cars by crashing into them without getting wrecked yourself". For this, they use the open-source TORCS game and a custom AI interface, allowing all and any AI researchers and enthusiasts (including you!) to submit their best and most aggressive controllers."
Games

Submission + - Should computer games adapt to the way you play? (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by
jtogel
jtogel writes: "Many games use "rubberbanding" to adapt to your skill level, making the game harder if you're a better player and vice versa. Just think of Mario Kart and the blatantly obvious ways it punishes you if you drive too well by giving the people who are hopelessly behind super-weapons to smack you with. It's also very common to just increase the skill of the NPCs as you get better — see e.g. Oblivion. In my research group, we are working on slightly more sophisticated ways to adapt the game to you, including generating new level elements based on your playing style.

Now, the question is: is this a good thing at all? Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression of the game designer. But still, game players have very different skill levels and skill sets when they come to a game, and we would like to cater to them all. And if you don't see playing skill as one-dimensional, maybe it's possible to do meaningful adaptation? What sort of game adaptation would you like to see? I'm very interested in your feedback here..."
XBox (Games)

Submission + - In the Underworld, the game plays you! (www.itu.dk)

Submitted by
togelius
togelius writes: "Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers. Researchers at the Center for Computer Games Research have now mined this data to find out who you are! Using self-organizing neural networks, they classified players as either Veterans, Solvers, Pacifists or Runners. It turns out people play the game for very different reasons and focus on different parts of the game, but almost everyone falls into one of these categories. These neural networks can now instantly find out which of these you belong to based on just seeing you play. In the near future, such networks will be used to adapt games like Tomb Raider while they are played (e.g. by removing or adding puzzles and enemies), so you get the game you want."
Programming

Submission + - Mario AI Competition (togelius.com)

Submitted by
togelius
togelius writes: "We're running a competition to see who can program the best AI for a version of Super Mario Bros. It's about each time step deciding what to do — run, jump, shoot etc. — based on a description of the platforms, items and enemies around Mario.

This is hard. So hard we believe that some sort of machine learning algorithm will be necessary to reach good playing performance. But really, any approach is game. We welcome hard-coded submissions, and we welcome commercial AI programmers, academics and amateurs alike. Whoever wins (maybe you?) this will be really interesting.

The competition is associated with two IEEE conferences and there are cash prizes available for the best submissions."
Programming

Submission + - Can we create fun games automatically? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
togelius
togelius writes: "What makes games fun? Some (e.g. Raph Koster) claim that is fun is learning — fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve. I think we can create fun game rules automatically through measuring their learnability. In a recent experiment we do this using evolutionary computation, and create some simple Pacman-like new games completely without human intervention! Maybe this is the future for game design? (Blog post, paper)."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Most impressive game AI?

Submitted by
togelius
togelius writes: "I have the feeling that when developers make the effort to put really sophisticated AI into a game, gamers frequently just don't notice (see e.g. Forza). Conversely, games that are lauded for their fantastic AI are sometimes based on very simple algorithms (e.g. Halo 1). For someone who wants to apply AI to games, it is very interesting to know what AI is really appreciated. So, what is the most impressive game AI you have come across? Have you ever encountered a situation where it really felt like the computer-controlled opponents were really thinking, that there were "someone in there"?"
Robotics

Submission + - Another step towards the driverless car

Submitted by
jtogel
jtogel writes: "At Essex, we have for some time been working on automatically learning how to race cars in simulation. It turns out that a combination of evolutionary algorithms and neural networks can learn how to beat all humans in racing games, and also come up with some quite interesting, novel behaviours, which might one day make their way into commercial racing games. While this is simulation, the race is now on for the real thing — we are setting up a competition for AI developers, where the goal is to win a race between model cars on real tracks. As the cars will be around half a meter long, the cost of participating will be a fraction of that for the famous DARPA Grand Challenge, whereas the challenges will be similar in terms of computer vision and AI."

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