Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games have become an increasingly popular test-bed for modern artificial intelligence techniques. With this rise in popularity has come the creation of several annual competitions, in which AI agents (bots) play the full game of StarCraft: Broodwar by Blizzard Entertainment. The three major annual StarCraft AI Competitions are the Student StarCraft AI Tournament (SSCAIT), the Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) competition, and the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) competition. In this paper we will give an overview of the current state of these competitions, and the bots that compete in them.

My thesis aims at conceptualizing and implementing a computational model of narrative generation that is informed by narratological theory as well as cognitive multi-agent simulation models. It approaches this problem by taking a mimetic stance towards fictional characters and investigates how narrative phenomena related to characters can be computationally recreated from a deep character model grounded in multi agent systems. Based on such a conceptualization of narrative it explores how the generation of plot can be controlled, and how the quality of the resulting plot can be evaluated, in dependence of fictional characters. By that it contributes to research on computational creativity by implementing an evaluative storytelling system, and to narratology by proposing a generative narrative theory based on several post-structuralist descriptive theories.

Over the past few years the Angry Birds AI competition has been held in an attempt to develop intelligent agents that can successfully and efficiently solve levels for the video game Angry Birds. Many different agents and strategies have been developed to solve the complex and challenging physical reasoning problems associated with such a game. However, the performance of these various agents is non-transitive and varies significantly across different levels. No single agent dominates all situations presented, indicating that different procedures are better at solving certain levels than others. We therefore propose the construction of a hyper-agent that selects from a portfolio of sub-agents whichever it believes is best at solving any given level. This hyper-agent utilises key features that can be observed about a level to rank the available candidate algorithms based on their expected score.The proposed method exhibits a significant increase in performance over the individual sub-agents, and demonstrates the potential of using such an approach to solve other physics-based games or problems.

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.

Peer review, evaluation, and selection is a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals of those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection, however, is much more general: a professional society may want to give a subset of its members awards based on the opinions of all members; an instructor for a MOOC or online course may want to crowdsource grading; or a marketing company may select ideas from group brainstorming sessions based on peer evaluation. We make three fundamental contributions to the study of procedures or mechanisms for peer selection, a specific type of group decision-making problem, studied in computer science, economics, and political science. First, we propose a novel mechanism that is strategyproof, i.e., agents cannot benefit by reporting insincere valuations. Second, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our mechanism by a comprehensive simulation-based comparison with a suite of mechanisms found in the literature. Finally, our mechanism employs a randomized rounding technique that is of independent interest, as it solves the apportionment problem that arises in various settings where discrete resources such as parliamentary representation slots need to be divided proportionally.

There are many differing opinions on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on our worklives, from dazzling to dystopian. Bill Gates, for one, sees the bright side of things. "Think of all the time we spend manually organizing and performing mundane activities, from scheduling meetings to paying the bills," he writes in the foreword to Satya Nadella's new book, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, "In the future, an AI agent will know that you are at work and have ten minutes free, and then help you accomplish something that is high on your to-do list. AI is on the verge of making our lives more productive and creative." Successful AI requires critical thinkers of the human variety.

The original article was first published on ITU Telecom World Blog. Views expressed are the author's own. In fact, it already has started – and has been running autonomously for over 8 years. It's called Multi Agent System, one of the branches of AI. It has evolved rapidly into many different forms, but most impressively one of its forms is autonomous.

In this paper, we show synchronization for a group of output passive agents that communicate with each other according to an underlying communication graph to achieve a common goal. We propose a distributed event-triggered control framework that will guarantee synchronization and considerably decrease the required communication load on the band-limited network. We define a general Byzantine attack on the event-triggered multi-agent network system and characterize its negative effects on synchronization. The Byzantine agents are capable of intelligently falsifying their data and manipulating the underlying communication graph by altering their respective control feedback weights. We introduce a decentralized detection framework and analyze its steady-state and transient performances. We propose a way of identifying individual Byzantine neighbors and a learning-based method of estimating the attack parameters. Lastly, we propose learning-based control approaches to mitigate the negative effects of the adversarial attack.

As we have seen previously with the likes of SethBling's Mar I/O videos and other examples, video games seem to be a great source for training AI neural networks. Augmented reality and machine learning are part of a collection of technologies that seem to be growing toward a point of maturity, and that will likely cause them to be intertwined for the foreseeable future. As developers, machine learning will definitely change the way we create software in the coming future. Instead of going line-by-line through code to create our next killer app, we will instead likely set the parameters and determine the training regimen for basic AI. And really, that future is likely not as far away as it may seem. In a blog post this week, Unity announced the release of the what they are calling Machine Learning Agents, or ML-agents for short.