Procedural content generation is becoming more and more relevant to solve the problem of content creation for the ever growing virtual worlds of games, simulations and other applications. However, these procedures are often unintuitive or use vague parameters, making it somewhat difficult for a designer to express his or her creative intent. Even worse, most of these techniques lack an accessible and easy to use interface.We have developed a generic layout solving approach to automatically create sensible content for virtual worlds. In that context, this paper proposes a high-level scene description language that allows designers to specify particular types of scenes. This description language allows designers to easily specify which objects need to be present in a scene, their attributes, and possible interrelationships. Application of the language, based on the rich vocabulary taken from a semantic library, is illustrated with several examples, showing its flexibility, intuitiveness and ease of use.

Most games being shipped today use some form of high-level abstraction such as a navmesh or waypoint graph for path planning. These structures can generally be represented in a form which is compact enough to meet the tight memory constraints in a game. But, when such a graph grows too large, finding paths can still be a complex task. This challenge was faced in Dragon Age: Origins and solved by adding an additional level of abstraction.In the last few years a variety of novel approaches have been developed for finding optimal paths through graphs with specific design applications for road networks. Currently these techniques cannot be feasibly applied to the lowest detail of movement possible in a game map, but can be applied to the high-level abstractions which are commonly found in games.In this paper we describe the pathfinding challenge faced before shipping the title Dragon Age: Origins and perform a postmortem analysis on the extended abstraction that was used in comparison to building more advanced heuristics or the use of contraction hierarchies. We show that contraction hierarchies and abstractions have similar overhead and performance and are both useful approaches for high-level planning in games.

Our goal is to enable Non Player Characters (NPC) in computer games to exhibit natural behaviors. The quality of behaviors affects the game experience especially in story-based games, which rely on player-NPC interactions. We used Reinforcement Learning to enable NPC companions to develop preferences for actions. We implemented our RL technique in BioWare Corp.’s Neverwinter Nights. Our experiments evaluate an NPC companion’s behaviors regarding traps. Our method enables NPCs to rapidly learn reasonable behaviors and adapt to changes in the game.

In this paper, we show that personalized levels can be auto- matically generated for platform games. We build on previ- ous work, where models were derived that predicted player experience based on features of level design and on playing styles. These models are constructed using preference learn- ing, based on questionnaires administered to players after playing different levels. The contributions of the current pa- per are (1) more accurate models based on a much larger data set; (2) a mechanism for adapting level design parameters to given players and playing style; (3) evaluation of this adap- tation mechanism using both algorithmic and human players. The results indicate that the adaptation mechanism effectively optimizes level design parameters for particular players.

Role-playing games, and other types of contemporary video games, usually contain a main storyline consisting of several causally related quests. As players have different motivations, tastes and preferences, it can be beneficial to customize game plotlines. In this paper, we present an offline algorithm for adapting human-authored game plotlines for computer role-playing games to suit the unique needs of individual players, thereby customizing gaming experiences and enhancing re-playability. Our approach uses an plan refinement technique based on partial-order planning to (a) optimize the global structure of the plotline according to input from a player model, (b) maintain plotline coherence, and (c) facilitate authorial intent by preserving as much of the original plotline as possible. A theoretical analysis of the authorial leverage and a user study suggest the benefits of this approach.

In the standard rules of the board game Risk, players take turns selecting or "drafting" the 42 territories on the board until all territories are owned. We present a technique for drafting territories in Risk that combines the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm UCT with an automated evaluation function. Created through supervised machine learning, this function scores outcomes of drafts in order to shorten the length of a UCT simulation. Using this approach, we augment an existing bot for the computer game Lux Delux, a clone of Risk. Our drafting technique is shown to greatly improve performance against the strongest opponents supplied with Lux Delux. The evidence provided indicates that territory drafting is important to overall success in Risk.

Shepherding with a dog presents an interesting challenge for artificial intelligence, with multiple intelligent systems assessing and interacting with each other in order to achieve a variety of goals. We present a solution to this problem, which consists of a dog AI making use of influence mapping, state machines and A* pathfinding to respond intelligently to real-life shepherding commands issued by a high-level shepherd AI steering the flock of sheep through waypoints on a variety of maps by using pathfinding and influence maps. The role of the AI shepherd can also be taken by a human player (using either a point and click or voice recognition interface) for matches against the artificial shepherd which proved to be a worthy opponent for human testers. The system was evaluated through user testing and provided a high degree of realism and engaging gameplay relying heavily on the workings of the presented AI components.

AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium, and the second AAAI Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence Symposium, to name only a few of the AAAI is pleased to present the 2011 Spring Symposium Series, to highlights. For complete information be held Monday through Wednesday, March 21-23, 2011, at on these programs, including Tutorial Stanford University.

The Best Paper award went to Sidney D'Mello, Blair Lehman, and Natalie Person for "Expert Tutors' Feedback Is Immediate, Direct, and Discriminating" in the special track on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. The Best Student Paper award went to Rong Hu, Brian Mac Namee, and Sarah Jane Delany for "Off to a Good Start: Using Clustering to Select the Initial Training Set in Active Learning" in the general conference. The Best Poster award went to Robert Holder for "Problem Space Analysis for Library Generation and Algorithm Selection in Real-Time Systems" in the general conference. In addition to a diverse assortment of papers and British Columbia, who presented "What Should posters presented at the conference, FLAIRS-23 featured the World-Wide Mind Believe? Information about FLAIRS-24, University, who presented "Rational Ways of Talking"; including the call for papers, is available online at and Janet L. Kolodner of the Georgia Institute www.flairs-24.info. of Technology, who presented "How Can We Help Université de Paris-Sorbonne, who presented "Reasoning in Natural Language Using Combinatory

The second Future of Humanity Institute on AGI and keynote was by Tecnalia neuroscientist Randal possible paths to technological singularity. Koene, who also gave a tutorial on the connection While the community of AGI researchers is between reinforcement learning models in AI and nowhere near a consensus on the best approach to in computational neuroscience. Koene's keynote the original, grand goal of the AI field, it's clear focused on technologies enabling detailed brain that the pursuit of the goal is alive and well, and imaging and whole-brain emulation and on the yielding interesting discoveries and discussions.