Physical site security heavily relies on expert teams continually examining and testing security profiles for discovering potential vulnerabilities. These experts hypothesize scenario(s) of interest and conduct "red versus blue" simulated exercises where they execute tactics that might reveal possible dangers. Due to the intensive manpower required, video-game environments have become a widely-adopted mechanism for conducting these exercises with virtual agents replacing many of the human roles for quicker analyses. However, these agents either have limited capabilities or require several engineers to develop realistic behaviors. This paper documents an agent architecture and authoring suite that enables subject matter experts to easily build complex attack/response plans for agents to use within Dante, a 3D simulation platform for video-game-based training/analysis of force-on-force engagements. This work expands upon current trends in commercial video-game artificial intelligence (AI) architectures to build agent behaviors deemed qualitatively valid by security experts, with the runtime of these algorithms best suited for turn-based, strategy games.

This paper makes a contribution to the advancement of artificial intelligence in the context of multi-agent planning for large-scale combat scenarios in RTS games. This paper introduces Fast Random Genetic Search (FRGS), a genetic algorithm which is characterized by a small active population, a crossover technique which produces only one child, dynamic mutation rates, elitism, and restrictions on revisiting solutions. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of FRGS against a static AI and a dynamic AI using the Portfolio Greedy Search (PGS) algorithm. In the context of the popular Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game, StarCraft, this paper shows the advantages of FRGS in combat scenarios up to the maximum size of 200 vs. 200 units under a 40 ms time constraint.

Rational agents are becoming prevalent in many domains, from data analysis to entertainment and games. The increased prevalence of agents has evolved new tools and techniques to work with and design new agents. One such technique is system simulation. Systems simulation is a technique an author can use to imitate tasks, processes, or systems, and in particular, agents. Systems simulation has a variety of uses, ranging from simulating ecological systems to entertainment, such as interactive narratives and digital games. However, many system simulators use specialized programming languages and require prior programming experience.

Intelligent autonomous agents that are acting in dynamic environmentsin real-time are often required to follow long-termstrategies while also remaining reactive and being able to actdeliberately. In order to create intelligent behaviors for videogame characters, there are two common approaches – plannersare used for long-term strategical planning, whereas BehaviorTrees allow for reactive acting. Although both methodologieshave their advantages, when used on their own, theyfail to fully achieve both requirements described above. Inthis work, we propose a hybrid approach combining a HierarchicalTask Network planner for high-level planning whiledelegating low-level decision making and acting to BehaviorTrees. Furthermore, we compare this approach with a pureplanner in a multi-agent environment.

The process of play testing a game is subjective, expensive and incomplete. In this paper, we present a play-testing approach that explores the game space with automated agents and collects data to answer questions posed by the designers. Rather than have agents interacting with an actual game client, this approach recreates the bare bone mechanics of the game as a separate system. Our agent is able to play in minutes what would take testers days of organic gameplay. The analysis of thousands of game simulations exposed imbalances in game actions, identified inconsequential rewards and evaluated the effectiveness of optional strategic choices. Our test case game, The Sims Mobile, was recently released and the findings shown here influenced design changes that resulted in improved player experience.

Social deduction games present a unique challenge for AI agents, because communication plays a central role in most of them, and deception plays a key role in game play. To be successful in such games, players need to come up with convincing stories, but also discern the truth of statements of other players and adapt to the information learned from them. In this paper we present an approach for virtual agents that have to determine how long to stick to their story in the light of information obtained from other players. We apply this approach to a particular social deduction game, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and demonstrate the effect of different levels of commitment to an agent's story.

To achieve the ambitious goals of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning must include planning with a model of the world that is abstract in state and time. Deep learning has made progress in state abstraction, but, although the theory of time abstraction has been extensively developed based on the options framework, in practice options have rarely been used in planning. One reason for this is that the space of possible options is immense and the methods previously proposed for option discovery do not take into account how the option models will be used in planning. Options are typically discovered by posing subsidiary tasks such as reaching a bottleneck state, or maximizing a sensory signal other than the reward. Each subtask is solved to produce an option, and then a model of the option is learned and made available to the planning process. The subtasks proposed in most previous work ignore the reward on the original problem, whereas we propose subtasks that use the original reward plus a bonus based on a feature of the state at the time the option stops. We show that options and option models obtained from such reward-respecting subtasks are much more likely to be useful in planning and can be learned online and off-policy using existing learning algorithms. Reward respecting subtasks strongly constrain the space of options and thereby also provide a partial solution to the problem of option discovery. Finally, we show how the algorithms for learning values, policies, options, and models can be unified using general value functions.

I present arguments against the hypothesis put forward by Silver, Singh, Precup, and Sutton ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370221000862 ) : reward maximization is not enough to explain many activities associated with natural and artificial intelligence including knowledge, learning, perception, social intelligence, evolution, language, generalisation and imitation. I show such reductio ad lucrum has its intellectual origins in the political economy of Homo economicus and substantially overlaps with the radical version of behaviourism. I show why the reinforcement learning paradigm, despite its demonstrable usefulness in some practical application, is an incomplete framework for intelligence -- natural and artificial. Complexities of intelligent behaviour are not simply second-order complications on top of reward maximisation. This fact has profound implications for the development of practically usable, smart, safe and robust artificially intelligent agents.

Mike Ananny walked his dog this morning. He did so with no expectation of privacy. "I know that I was subject to a wide variety of cameras, whether it's Ring doorbells, cars driving along, or even city traffic cameras," he said. "I didn't choose to participate in this whole variety of video surveillance systems. I just took my dog for a walk." Ananny understands that, wherever he goes, data about him is being collected, analyzed and monetized by artificial intelligence (AI). Kate Crawford drove a van deep into the arid Nevada landscape to get a good look at the evaporating brine ponds of the Silver Peak Lithium Mine.

We introduce Boolean Observation Games, a subclass of multi-player finite strategic games with incomplete information and qualitative objectives. In Boolean observation games, each player is associated with a finite set of propositional variables of which only it can observe the value, and it controls whether and to whom it can reveal that value. It does not control the given, fixed, value of variables. Boolean observation games are a generalization of Boolean games, a well-studied subclass of strategic games but with complete information, and wherein each player controls the value of its variables. In Boolean observation games player goals describe multi-agent knowledge of variables. As in classical strategic games, players choose their strategies simultaneously and therefore observation games capture aspects of both imperfect and incomplete information. They require reasoning about sets of outcomes given sets of indistinguishable valuations of variables. What a Nash equilibrium is, depends on an outcome relation between such sets. We present various outcome relations, including a qualitative variant of ex-post equilibrium. We identify conditions under which, given an outcome relation, Nash equilibria are guaranteed to exist. We also study the complexity of checking for the existence of Nash equilibria and of verifying if a strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium. We further study the subclass of Boolean observation games with `knowing whether' goal formulas, for which the satisfaction does not depend on the value of variables. We show that each such Boolean observation game corresponds to a Boolean game and vice versa, by a different correspondence, and that both correspondences are precise in terms of existence of Nash equilibria.