The first major story generation system, which preceded Minstrel and which While ongoing progress in digital entertainment also received significant attention, is Tale-Spin (Meehan technology continues, commercial designers still largely 1977). Like Minstrel, this system generates stories which eschew systems for procedural story generation, preferring satisfy user-submitted requirements. Tale-Spin creates instead to generate content by hand. In the academic English stories by planning a method for the main literature, projects such as (Appling & Riedl 2009, Roberts character to achieve her or his goal, using inferences and & Isbell 2009) continue to investigate ways to improve the rules to generate a large number of details about a story nuances of interactive storytelling while others attempt to (many of which do little contribute to an audience create their own systems to investigate ways to use experience). This contrasts nicely with Minstrel, which knowledge from interactive narrative and story generation performs no logical inferences and which performs all in new fields such as playable games (Drachen & Hitchens actions from the point of view of an author, manipulating et al. 2009, Sullivan, Mateas & Wardrip-Fruin 2009).

Real-time heuristic search algorithms satisfy a constant bound on the amount of planning per action, independent of problem size. As a result, they scale up well as problems become larger. This property would make them well suited for video games where Artificial Intelligence controlled agents must react quickly to user commands and to other agents' actions. On the downside, real-time search algorithms employ learning methods that frequently lead to poor solution quality and cause the agent to appear irrational by re-visiting the same problem states repeatedly. The situation changed recently with a new algorithm, D LRTA*, which attempted to eliminate learning by automatically selecting subgoals. D LRTA* is well poised for video games, except it has a complex and memory-demanding pre-computation phase during which it builds a database of subgoals. In this paper, we propose a simpler and more memory-efficient way of pre-computing subgoals thereby eliminating the main obstacle to applying state-of-the-art real-time search methods in video games. The new algorithm solves a number of randomly chosen problems off-line, compresses the solutions into a series of subgoals and stores them in a database. When presented with a novel problem on-line, it queries the database for the most similar previously solved case and uses its subgoals to solve the problem. In the domain of pathfinding on four large video game maps, the new algorithm delivers solutions eight times better while using 57 times less memory and requiring 14% less pre-computation time.

We propose a simple kernel based nearest neighbor approach for handwritten digit classification. The "distance" here is actually a kernel defining the similarity between two images. We carefully study the effects of different number of neighbors and weight schemes and report the results. With only a few nearest neighbors (or most similar images) to vote, the test set error rate on MNIST database could reach about 1.5%-2.0%,

The work presented in this paper is part of a multidisciplinary team collaborating in the deployment of an autonomous oceanographic probe with the task of exploring marine regions and take phytoplankton samples for their subsequent analysis in a laboratory. We will describe an autonomous system that, from sensor data, is able to characterize phytoplankton structures. Because the system has to work inboard, a main goal of our approach is to dramatically reduce the dimensionality of the problem. Specifically, our development uses two AI techniques, namely Particle Swarm Optimization and Case-Based Reasoning. We report results of experiments performed with simulated environments.

Creating artificial intelligent agents that are high-fidelity simulations of natural agents will require the engagement of behavioral scientists. However, agent programming systems that are accessible to behavioral scientists are too limited to create rich agents, and systems for creating rich agents are accessible mainly to computer scientists, not behavioral scientists. We are solving this problem by engaging behavioral scientists in the design of a programming language, and integrating reinforcement learning into the programming language. This strategy will help our language achieve adaptivity, modularity, and, most importantly, accessibility to behavioral scientists. In addition to allowing behavioral scientist to write rich agent programs, our language — AFABL (A Friendly Behavior Language) — will enable a true discipline of modular agent software engineering with broad implications for games, interactive storytelling, and social simulations.

An Analysis of Current Trends in CBR Research Using Multi-View Clustering

The European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) in 2008 marked 15 years of international and European CBR conferences where almost seven hundred research papers were published. In this report we review the research themes covered in these papers and identify the topics that are active at the moment. The main mechanism for this analysis is a clustering of the research papers based on both co-citation links and text similarity. It is interesting to note that the core set of papers has attracted citations from almost three thousand papers outside the conference collection so it is clear that the CBR conferences are a sub-part of a much larger whole. It is remarkable that the research themes revealed by this analysis do not map directly to the sub-topics of CBR that might appear in a textbook. Instead they reflect the applications-oriented focus of CBR research, and cover the promising application areas and research challenges that are faced.

These formalisms have in common the use of certain kinds of constructs (for example, objects, goals, skills, and tasks) that represent knowledge of varying degrees of complexity and that are connected through structural relations. In recent years, we have observed increasing interest toward the problem of learning such structural knowledge from observations. These observations range from traces generated by an automated planner to video feeds from a robot performing some actions. The goal of the workshop was to bring researchers together from machine learning, automated planning, case-based reasoning, cognitive science, and other communities that are looking into instances of this problem and to share ideas and perspectives in a common forum.

We consider the problem of using nearest neighbor methods to provide a conditional probability estimate, P(y|a), when the number of labels y is large and the labels share some underlying structure. We propose a method for learning error-correcting output codes (ECOCs) to model the similarity between labels within a nearest neighbor framework. The learned ECOCs and nearest neighbor information are used to provide conditional probability estimates. We apply these estimates to the problem of acoustic modeling for speech recognition. We demonstrate an absolute reduction in word error rate (WER) of 0.9% (a 2.5% relative reduction in WER) on a lecture recognition task over a state-of-the-art baseline GMM model.

The longstanding problem of efficient nearest-neighbor (NN) search has ubiquitous applicationsranging from astrophysics to MP3 fingerprinting to bioinformatics to movie recommendations. As the dimensionality of the dataset increases, exact NNsearch becomes computationally prohibitive;(1) distance-approximate NN search can provide large speedups but risks losing the meaning of NN search present in the ranks (ordering) of the distances. This paper presents a simple, practical algorithm allowing the user to, for the first time, directly control the true accuracy of NN search (in terms of ranks) while still achieving the large speedups over exact NN. Experiments on high-dimensional datasets show that our algorithm often achieves faster and more accurate results than the best-known distance-approximate method, with much more stable behavior.