Real-time strategy (RTS) games are hard from an AI point of view because they have enormous state spaces, combinatorial branching factors, allow simultaneous and durative actions, and players have very little time to choose actions. For these reasons, standard game tree search methods such as alpha- beta search or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) are not sufficient by themselves to handle these games. This paper presents an alternative approach called Adversarial Hierarchical Task Network (AHTN) planning that combines ideas from game tree search with HTN planning. We present the basic algorithm, relate it to existing adversarial hierarchical planning methods, and present new extensions for simultaneous and durative actions to handle RTS games. We also present empirical results for the μRTS game, comparing it to other state of the art search algorithms for RTS games.

The AIIDE-14 Workshop program was held Friday and Saturday, October 3–4, 2014 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The workshop program included five workshops covering a wide range of topics. The titles of the workshops held Friday were Games and Natural Language Processing, and Artificial Intelligence in Adversarial Real-Time Games. The titles of the workshops held Saturday were Diversity in Games Research, Experimental Artificial Intelligence in Games, and Musical Metacreation.

The AIIDE-14 Workshop program was held Friday and Saturday, October 3–4, 2014 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The workshop program included five workshops covering a wide range of topics. The titles of the workshops held Friday were Games and Natural Language Processing, and Artificial Intelligence in Adversarial Real-Time Games. The titles of the workshops held Saturday were Diversity in Games Research, Experimental Artificial Intelligence in Games, and Musical Metacreation. This article presents short summaries of those events.

Film cinematography has been developed and applied for more than a century to involve and engage the viewer in visual storytelling. Interactive storytelling games can benefit from these cinematic conventions to enhance visual experience. However, even conversation scenes in games are highly dynamic, and pre-authoring camera parameters using cinematography principles is often insufficient. This paper proposes an automatic Visual Director System focused on dynamic conversation scenes involving three characters and reports on work in progress on a prototype applied to the recreation of a movie scene. Based on principles of cinematography and the study of film scenes, cinematic conventions for triadic conversations are encoded modularly as an artificial intelligence game component that selects suitable shots for dynamic scenes.

This paper presents a constraint optimization approach to walling in real-time strategy (RTS) games. Walling is a specific type of spatial reasoning, typically employed by human expert players and not currently fully exploited in RTS game AI, consisting on finding configurations of buildings to completely or partially block paths. Our approach is based on local search, and is specifically designed for the real-time nature of RTS games. We present experiments in the context of the RTS game StarCraft showing promising results.

From an AI point of view, Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games are hard because they have enormous state spaces, they are real-time and partially observable. In this paper, we explore an approach to deploy game-tree search in RTS games by using game state abstraction, and explore the effect of using different abstractions over the game state. Different abstractions capture different parts of the game state, and result in different branching factors when used for game-tree search algorithms. We evaluate the different representations using Monte Carlo Tree Search in the context of StarCraft.

Procedural content generation (PCG) has become a popular research topic in recent years, but not much work has been done in terms of generalized content generators,that is, methods that can generate content for a wide variety of games without requiring hand-tuning. Probabilistic approaches are a promising avenue for creating more general content generators, and specificially map generators. I am interested in exploring probabilistic techniques that could lead to generalized procedural level generators.

In this paper we describe a hierarchical method for procedurallygenerating maps using Markov chains. Ourmethod takes as input a collection of human-authoredtwo-dimensional maps, and splits them into high-leveltiles which capture large structures. Markov chains arethen learned from those maps to capture the structure ofboth the high-level tiles, as well as the low-level tiles.Then, the learned Markov chains are used to generatenew maps by first generating the high-level structure ofthe map using high-level tiles, and then generating thelow-level layout of the map. We validate our approachusing the game Super Mario Bros., by evaluating thequality of maps produced using different configurationsfor training and generation.

It is our pleasure to present to you the three papers that were accepted for presentation at this second AIIDE workshop on AI for adversarial real-time games, covering building placement optimization, sequential pattern mining for achieving short and long-term goals, and high-level representation for search in RTS games.

From an AI point of view, Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games are hard because they have enormous state spaces, they are real-time and partially observable. In this paper, we present an approach to deploy game-tree search in RTS games by using game state abstraction. We propose a high-level abstract representation of the game state, that significantly reduces the branching factor when used for game-tree search algorithms. Using this high-level representation, we evaluate versions of alpha-beta search and of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). We present experiments in the context of StarCraft showing promising results in dealing with the large branching factors present in RTS games.