Pérez-Liébana, Diego
Modeling Player Experience with the N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm
Kunanusont, Kamolwan (University of Essex) | Lucas, Simon Mark (Queen Mary University of London) | Pérez-Liébana, Diego (Queen Mary University of London)
Automatic game design is an increasingly popular area of research that consists of devising systems that create content or complete games autonomously. The interest in such systems is two-fold: games can be highly stochastic environments that allow presenting this task as a complex optimization problem and automatic play-testing, becoming benchmarks to advance the state of the art on AI methods. In this paper, we propose a general approach that employs the N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm (NTBEA) to tune parameters of three different games of the General Video Game AI (GVGAI) framework. The objective is to adjust the game experience of the players so the distribution of score events through the game approximates certain pre-defined target curves. We report satisfactory results for different target score trends and games, paving the path for future research in the area of automatically tuning player experience.
VERTIGØ: Visualisation of Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms in GVGAI
Gaina, Raluca D. (Queen Mary University of London) | Lucas, Simon M. (Queen Mary University of London) | Pérez-Liébana, Diego (Queen Mary University of London)
This report presents a tool developed for the analysis and visualisation of Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms, featuring a GUI which allows integration within the General Video Game AI Framework. Users are able to easily customize the parameters of the agent between runs and observe an in-depth analysis of its performance through various visual information extracted from gameplay data, live while playing the game. This visualisation aims to inform a deeper analysis into algorithm behaviour, in an attempt to justify why they make the decisions they do and improve their performance based on this knowledge.
Optimal resampling for the noisy OneMax problem
Liu, Jialin, Fairbank, Michael, Pérez-Liébana, Diego, Lucas, Simon M.
The OneMax problem is a standard benchmark optimisation problem for a binary search space. Recent work on applying a Bandit-Based Random Mutation Hill-Climbing algorithm to the noisy OneMax Problem showed that it is important to choose a good value for the resampling number to make a careful trade off between taking more samples in order to reduce noise, and taking fewer samples to reduce the total computational cost. This paper extends that observation, by deriving an analytical expression for the running time of the RMHC algorithm with resampling applied to the noisy OneMax problem, and showing both theoretically and empirically that the optimal resampling number increases with the number of dimensions in the search space.