Although the traits emerged in a mass gathering are often non-deliberative, the act of mass impulse may lead to irre- vocable crowd disasters. The two-fold increase of carnage in crowd since the past two decades has spurred significant advances in the field of computer vision, towards effective and proactive crowd surveillance. Computer vision stud- ies related to crowd are observed to resonate with the understanding of the emergent behavior in physics (complex systems) and biology (animal swarm). These studies, which are inspired by biology and physics, share surprisingly common insights, and interesting contradictions. However, this aspect of discussion has not been fully explored. Therefore, this survey provides the readers with a review of the state-of-the-art methods in crowd behavior analysis from the physics and biologically inspired perspectives. We provide insights and comprehensive discussions for a broader understanding of the underlying prospect of blending physics and biology studies in computer vision.

Hand-coded finite-state machines and behavior trees are the go-to techniques for artificial intelligence (AI) developers that want full control over their character's bearing. However, manually crafting behaviors for computer-controlled agents is a tedious and parameter-dependent task. From a high-level view, the process of designing agent AI by hand usually starts with the determination of a suitable set of action sequences. Once the AI developer has identified these sequences he merges them into a complete behavior by specifying appropriate transitions between them. Automated techniques, such as learning, tree search and planning, are on the other end of the AI toolset's spectrum. They do not require the manual definition of action sequences and adapt to parameter changes automatically. Yet AI developers are reluctant to incorporate them in games because of their performance footprint and lack of immediate designer control. We propose a method that, given the symbolic definition of a problem domain, can automatically extract a transparent behavior model from Goal-Oriented Action Planning (GOAP). The method first observes the behavior exhibited by GOAP in a Monte-Carlo simulation and then evolves a suitable behavior tree using a genetic algorithm. The generated behavior trees are comprehensible, refinable and as performant as hand-crafted ones.

We present a system for autonomously generating puzzles in the form of a 2D, tile-based world.  Puzzle design is entirely dependent on tile characteristics, which are implemented as abstract classes that can be modified by the system.  Thus, the system controls not only the base-level puzzle design but also (to some extent) the meta-level component design.  The result is a rich space of possible puzzles that the system explores with a combination of evolutionary computation and Q -learning.  The system autonomously produces a variety of puzzles of varying difficulty to create a game called Loki's Castle .  The system is almost completely autonomous, requiring only a minimal description of what a puzzle should include, and the abstraction allows extensibility so that future versions can invent entirely new classes of tiles.  Several puzzle examples are presented to demonstrate the system's capability.

This paper describes the structure of a web service able to generate simple game levels via constrained evolutionary optimization. The provided web service allows users to generate playable game levels without needing to understand the underlying process and without having to allocate computational resources for doing so; combined with the highly expressive and customizable generator, a broad range of levels for different genres and purposes can meet many user needs.

This paper describes computational processes which can simulate how human designers sketch and then iteratively refine their work. The paper uses the concept of a map sketch as an initial, low-resolution and low-fidelity prototype of a game level, and suggests how such map sketches can be refined computationally. Different case studies with map sketches of different genres showcase how refinement can be achieved via increasing the resolution of the game level, increasing the fidelity of the function which evaluates it, or a combination of the two. While these case studies use genetic algorithms to automatically generate levels at different degrees of refinement, the general method described in this paper can be used with most procedural generation methods, as well as for AI-assisted design alongside a human creator.

This paper introduces a search-based generative process for first person shooter levels. Genetic algorithms evolve the level's architecture and the placement of powerups and player spawnpoints, generating levels with one floor or two floors. The evaluation of generated levels combines metrics collected from simulations of artificial agents competing in the level and theory-based heuristics targeting general level design patterns. Both simulation-based and theory-driven evaluations target player balance and exploration, while resulting levels emergently exhibit several popular design patters of shooter levels.

Horror games form a peculiar niche within game design paradigms, as they entertain by eliciting negative emotions such as fear and unease to their audience during play. This genre often follows a specific progression of tension culminating at a metaphorical peak, which is defined by the designer. A player's tension is elicited by several facets of the game, including its mechanics, its sounds, and the placement of enemies in its levels. This paper investigates how designers can control and guide the automated generation of levels and their soundscapes by authoring the intended tension of a player traversing them.

A model of an Ant System where ants are controlled by a spiking neural circuit and a second order pheromone mechanism in a foraging task is presented. A neural circuit is trained for individual ants and subsequently the ants are exposed to a virtual environment where a swarm of ants performed a resource foraging task. The model comprises an associative and unsupervised learning strategy for the neural circuit of the ant. The neural circuit adapts to the environment by means of classical conditioning. The initially unknown environment includes different types of stimuli representing food and obstacles which, when they come in direct contact with the ant, elicit a reflex response in the motor neural system of the ant: moving towards or away from the source of the stimulus. The ants are released on a landscape with multiple food sources where one ant alone would have difficulty harvesting the landscape to maximum efficiency. The introduction of a double pheromone mechanism yields better results than traditional ant colony optimization strategies. Traditional ant systems include mainly a positive reinforcement pheromone. This approach uses a second pheromone that acts as a marker for forbidden paths (negative feedback). This blockade is not permanent and is controlled by the evaporation rate of the pheromones. The combined action of both pheromones acts as a collective stigmergic memory of the swarm, which reduces the search space of the problem. This paper explores how the adaptation and learning abilities observed in biologically inspired cognitive architectures is synergistically enhanced by swarm optimization strategies. The model portraits two forms of artificial intelligent behaviour: at the individual level the spiking neural network is the main controller and at the collective level the pheromone distribution is a map towards the solution emerged by the colony.

Optimization of very expensive black-box functions requires utilization of maximum information gathered by the process of optimization. Model Guided Sampling Optimization (MGSO) forms a more robust alternative to Jones' Gaussian-process-based EGO algorithm. Instead of EGO's maximizing expected improvement, the MGSO uses sampling the probability of improvement which is shown to be helpful against trapping in local minima. Further, the MGSO can reach close-to-optimum solutions faster than standard optimization algorithms on low dimensional or smooth problems.

In this treatise we aim to build a hybrid network automated (self-adaptive) security threats discovery and prevention system; by using unconventional techniques and methods, including fuzzy logic and biological inspired algorithms under the context of soft computing.