Modern commercial games are designed for mass appeal, not for individual players, but there is a unique opportunity in video games to better fit the individual through adapting game elements. In this paper, we focus on AI Directors, systems which can dynamically modify a game, that personalize the player experience to match the player's preference. In the past, some AI Director studies have provided inconclusive results, so their effect on player experience is not clear. We take three AI Directors and directly compare them in a human subject study to test their effectiveness on quest selection. Our results show that a non-random AI Director provides a better player experience than a random AI Director.

Some two years ago we published an article that tried to answer the question of when will we see the world's first AI movie director? In this article I stated that "It seems certain that the first AI directed movie will be either a cartoon or animated film." Well, two years on, it was brought to my attention, rather embarrassingly, that some people feel that by the time I even wrote that article that we had already seen the first AI directed film. I noted in that article that the "first ever AI generated script that was turned into a movie called Sunspring (2016)", a real milestone for artificial intelligence. Well, it turns out that it was an evolution of the same artificial intelligence system that, only two years later in 2018, did in fact'direct' a movie.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly powerful over so many aspects of our lives, from whether we get a mortgage to what treatment we get in hospital. But women and minority groups aren't proportionally represented in the development of the technology, leading to concerns that AI systems will become more biased and unethical. According to the World Economic Forum, only 22% of all AI professionals globally are women; meanwhile, research from The Alan Turing Institute has revealed that only eight percent of UK researchers who contribute to the leading machine learning conferences are women. So, decision-making machines are shaping the world, but the people whose work underpins that vision aren't representative of the society these systems are supposed to serve. Technology, as I'm sure we all know, is not neutral.

The Department of Energy's first artificial intelligence director is currently reviewing more than 600 AI projects across its agencies to identify "critical" technologies worth advancing and replicating. Earlier this month, Cheryl Ingstad was named head of DOE's new Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office (AITO), intended to prioritize department resources for AI projects as the coordinating agency. The Trump administration proposed funding AITO at $5 million in fiscal 2021 -- up from $2.5 million the previous fiscal year -- but the office will be tapping into other agencies' funds as well. "They have program and project resources available," Ingstad told FedScoop in an interview. Energy has 17 national laboratories developing and applying AI to power generation, cybersecurity, national security, and accelerating scientific discoveries.

Apple's secretive autonomous car project has shifted focus over the years, but this year, it seems to be picking up speed. In April, the company received a permit to test self-driving cars in California, while in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that they were working on software that could allow cars -- and maybe other things -- to drive themselves. During a talk on Friday, Apple's director of artificial intelligence research, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, spoke about some of the company's recent advances in machine learning that would be useful for such a project. Wired reports that Salakhutdinov spoke before a group of AI experts at the end of this year's Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Long Beach, California. There, he spoke about how Apple is using machine learning to analyze data to from a vehicle's cameras. He talked about techniques used in a recently published study on the advances that the company has made in using AI to detect pedestrians and cyclists using LiDAR.

Apple's director of artificial intelligence, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, believes that the deep neural networks that have produced spectacular results in recent years could be supercharged in coming years by the addition of memory, attention, and general knowledge. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Salakhutdinov said these attributes could help solve some of the outstanding problems in artificial intelligence. Salakhutdinov, who retains a post as an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, pointed in his talk to limitations with deep-learning-driven machine vision and natural-language understanding. Deep learning--a technique that involves using vast numbers of roughly simulated neurons arranged in many interconnected layers--has produced dramatic progress in machine perception over recent years, but there are many ways in which these networks are limited. Salakhutdinov showed, for example, how image captioning systems based on the technology can label images incorrectly because they tend to focus on everything in the image.

Apple's director of artificial intelligence, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, believes that the deep neural networks that have produced spectacular results in recent years could be supercharged in coming years by the addition of memory, attention, and general knowledge. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Salakhutdinov said these attributes could help solve some of the outstanding problems in artificial intelligence. Salakhutdinov, who retains a post as an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, pointed in his talk to limitations with deep-learning-driven machine vision and natural-language understanding. Deep learning--a technique that involves using vast numbers of roughly simulated neurons arranged in many interconnected layers--has produced dramatic progress in machine perception over recent years, but there are many ways in which these networks are limited. Salakhutdinov showed, for example, how image captioning systems based on the technology can label images incorrectly because they tend to focus on everything in the image.

From Ex Machina to Terminator, artificial intelligence has long been a subject for film-makers. But what if AI could actually make a movie? At the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Thursday morning, an audience was shown a series of short films in the annual New Directors Showcase, which highlights emerging talent. A few days ago, I saw Eclipse, a pop video featuring a French band, at the offices of Saatchi and Saatchi, which runs the Cannes showcase and commissioned the AI entry. What is remarkable about it is not the production values - it is actually a rather dull piece of work - but a process that involved AI at every stage.

A Silicon Valley chip designer has launched a USB stick with a supercomputer onboard. Movidius, based in San Mateo, California, has essentially put a deep learning chip inside a USB drive. Deep learning involves "training" a computational model so it can decipher natural language. The "Fathom Neural Compute Stick" has been designed to connect to existing systems (running Linux) and increase the performance of deep learning tasks by 20-30 times. Movidius chips are also used to help drones to avoid obstacles and thermal cameras to spot people in a fire.

Nearly all games need some amount of artificial intelligence -- most commonly to give the player non-human opponents. But conversations about good AI in games are still dominated by Façade, Black & White, The Sims, Versu, and F.E.A.R. -- all of which came out years ago. Those games are hardly the only examples we can draw from in envisioning artificial intelligence systems. We reached out to several developers for their input on more recent games making innovative and instructive uses of AI. The following list of games are all notable for the interesting, clever, and/or novel ways in which they use AI, and all are well worth a closer look if you're eager to let a little algorithmic thinking improve your game design. The underlying ideas they explore point toward the exciting and diverse future artificial intelligence could have.