Observer effect in physics (/psychology) regards bias in measurement (/perception) due to the interference of instrument (/knowledge). Based on these concepts, a new meta-heuristic algorithm is proposed for controlling memory usage per localities without pursuing Tabu-like cut-off approaches. In this paper, first, variations of observer effect are explained in different branches of science from physics to psychology. Then, a metaheuristic algorithm is proposed based on observer effect concepts and the used metrics are explained. The derived optimizer performance has been compared between 1st, non-homogeneous-peaks-density functions, and 2nd, homogeneous-peaks-density functions to verify the algorithm outperformance in the 1st scheme. Finally, performance analysis of the novel algorithms is derived using two real-world engineering applications in Electroencephalogram feature learning and Distributed Generator parameter tuning, each of which having nonlinearity and complex multi-modal peaks distributions as its characteristics. Also, the effect of version improvement has been assessed. The performance analysis among other optimizers in the same context suggests that the proposed algorithm is useful both solely and in hybrid Gradient Descent settings where problem's search space is nonhomogeneous in terms of local peaks density.

Swarm-based optimizers like Particle Swarm Optimization or Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm that act under influences of cooperation or competition among groups, are unable to search in multiple volumes of locality or globality and do not have nested localities. As hybrid optimizers, they may not give satisfactory results as initializers in Gradient Descent approximators used in plenty of multimodal problems like nonlinear subspace learning and neural network training, which have hierarchies of convex spaces due to nonlinearity and multi-layer nature of these models. To search in various levels of scale in a homogenous way, a framework is proposed to equip PSO and ICA a multi-scale search capability. Then, the resulted optimizers are evaluated in single and GD-hybridized mode. Hybrid evaluation as GD randomizer is implemented with the help of a nonlinear subspace filtering objective function over EEG data and optimization loss and validation data accuracy is compared with other hybrids containing GD. A single evaluation is also taken place between the proposed ones, PSO, ICA, CLPSO, and CICA, which are used more in hybrid learning-based approaches. Evaluations were with respect to solution error. Before concluding the paper, it is shown and analyzed that proposed optimizers outperform algorithms of related context both in single and hybrid-GD mode.

We propose the use of quality-diversity algorithms for mixed-initiative game content generation. This idea is implemented as a new feature of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer, a system for mixed-initiative design of the type of levels you typically find in computer role playing games. The feature uses the MAP-Elites algorithm, an illumination algorithm which divides the population into a number of cells depending on their values along several behavioral dimensions. Users can flexibly and dynamically choose relevant dimensions of variation, and incorporate suggestions produced by the algorithm in their map designs. At the same time, any modifications performed by the human feed back into MAP-Elites, and are used to generate further suggestions.

We introduce the General Video Game Rule Generation problem, and the eponymous software framework which will be used in a new track of the General Video Game AI (GVGAI) competition. The problem is, given a game level as input, to generate the rules of a game that fits that level. This can be seen as the inverse of the General Video Game Level Generation problem. Conceptualizing these two problems as separate helps breaking the very hard problem of generating complete games into smaller, more manageable subproblems. The proposed framework builds on the GVGAI software and thus asks the rule generator for rules defined in the Video Game Description Language. We describe the API, and three different rule generators: a random, a constructive and a search-based generator. Early results indicate that the constructive generator generates playable and somewhat interesting game rules but has a limited expressive range, whereas the search-based generator generates remarkably diverse rulesets, but with an uneven quality.

With the continuous and vast increase in the amount of data in our digital world, it has been acknowledged that the number of knowledgeable data scientists can not scale to address these challenges. Thus, there was a crucial need for automating the process of building good machine learning models. In the last few years, several techniques and frameworks have been introduced to tackle the challenge of automating the process of Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyper-parameter tuning (CASH) in the machine learning domain. The main aim of these techniques is to reduce the role of the human in the loop and fill the gap for non-expert machine learning users by playing the role of the domain expert. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey for the state-of-the-art efforts in tackling the CASH problem. In addition, we highlight the research work of automating the other steps of the full complex machine learning pipeline (AutoML) from data understanding till model deployment. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive coverage for the various tools and frameworks that have been introduced in this domain. Finally, we discuss some of the research directions and open challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve the vision and goals of the AutoML process.

The space of Artificial Intelligence entities is dominated by conversational bots. Some of them fit in our pockets and we take them everywhere we go, or allow them to be a part of human homes. Siri, Alexa, they are recognised as present in our world. But a lot of games research is restricted to existing in the separate realm of software. We enter different worlds when playing games, but those worlds cease to exist once we quit. Similarly, AI game-players are run once on a game (or maybe for longer periods of time, in the case of learning algorithms which need some, still limited, period for training), and they cease to exist once the game ends. But what if they didn't? What if there existed artificial game-players that continuously played games, learned from their experiences and kept getting better? What if they interacted with the real world and us, humans: live-streaming games, chatting with viewers, accepting suggestions for strategies or games to play, forming opinions on popular game titles? In this paper, we introduce the vision behind a new project called Thyia, which focuses around creating a present, continuous, `always-on', interactive game-player.

At the 2017 Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games meeting at Dagstuhl, Julian Togelius asked how to make spaces where every way of filling in the details yielded a good game. This study examines the possibility of enriching search spaces so that they contain very high rates of interesting objects, specifically game elements. While we do not answer the full challenge of finding good games throughout the space, this study highlights a number of potential avenues. These include naturally rich spaces, a simple technique for modifying a representation to search only rich parts of a larger search space, and representations that are highly expressive and so exhibit highly restricted and consequently enriched search spaces.

In this work we show that Evolution Strategies (ES) are a viable method for learning non-differentiable parameters of large supervised models. ES are black-box optimization algorithms that estimate distributions of model parameters; however they have only been used for relatively small problems so far. We show that it is possible to scale ES to more complex tasks and models with millions of parameters. While using ES for differentiable parameters is computationally impractical (although possible), we show that a hybrid approach is practically feasible in the case where the model has both differentiable and non-differentiable parameters. In this approach we use standard gradient-based methods for learning differentiable weights, while using ES for learning non-differentiable parameters - in our case sparsity masks of the weights. This proposed method is surprisingly competitive, and when parallelized over multiple devices has only negligible training time overhead compared to training with gradient descent. Additionally, this method allows to train sparse models from the first training step, so they can be much larger than when using methods that require training dense models first.

Dance is an art and when technology meets this kind of art, it's a novel attempt in itself. Several researchers have attempted to automate several aspects of dance, right from dance notation to choreography. Furthermore, we have encountered several applications of dance automation like e-learning, heritage preservation, etc. Despite several attempts by researchers for more than two decades in various styles of dance all round the world, we found a review paper that portrays the research status in this area dating to 1990 \cite{politis1990computers}. Hence, we decide to come up with a comprehensive review article that showcases several aspects of dance automation. This paper is an attempt to review research work reported in the literature, categorize and group all research work completed so far in the field of automating dance. We have explicitly identified six major categories corresponding to the use of computers in dance automation namely dance representation, dance capturing, dance semantics, dance generation, dance processing approaches and applications of dance automation systems. We classified several research papers under these categories according to their research approach and functionality. With the help of proposed categories and subcategories one can easily determine the state of research and the new avenues left for exploration in the field of dance automation.

We present a deep reinforcement learning approach to optimizing the execution cost of computation graphs in a static compiler. The key idea is to combine a neural network policy with a genetic algorithm, the Biased Random-Key Genetic Algorithm (BRKGA). The policy is trained to predict, given an input graph to be optimized, the node-level probability distributions for sampling mutations and crossovers in BRKGA. Our approach, "REINFORCE-based Genetic Algorithm Learning" (REGAL), uses the policy's ability to transfer to new graphs to significantly improve the solution quality of the genetic algorithm for the same objective evaluation budget. As a concrete application, we show results for minimizing peak memory in TensorFlow graphs by jointly optimizing device placement and scheduling. REGAL achieves on average 3.56% lower peak memory than BRKGA on previously unseen graphs, outperforming all the algorithms we compare to, and giving 4.4x bigger improvement than the next best algorithm. We also evaluate REGAL on a production compiler team's performance benchmark of XLA graphs and achieve on average 3.74% lower peak memory than BRKGA, again outperforming all others. Our approach and analysis is made possible by collecting a dataset of 372 unique real-world TensorFlow graphs, more than an order of magnitude more data than previous work.