The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's 2021 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment was held October 11-15, 2021. There were three workshops in the program: Experimental AI in Games, Programming Languages in Entertainment, and Strategy Games. This report contains summaries of some, but not all symposia. The 2021 Experimental AI in Games Workshop helped to encourage experimentation and discovery in game AI research and game development. This year saw fourteen presentations exploring established subjects such as level and narrative generation, to theoretical and practitioner work.

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, MD: One touch, one kill -- is this the user-friendly future of warfare? I sat in front of a touchscreen, watching black-and-white infrared video of the gunnery range outside. Lined up on the left edge of the screen were still-image close-ups of what an experimental AI had decided were valid targets: dummies representing enemy infantry and vehicles, plus a real pick-up truck. Disengage safety, tap a target with your finger, and, 20 yards away, an unmanned turret automatically slewed to aim its 50mm cannon at that target. If one more button had been enabled, I could have opened fire.

In what may be the biggest rollout of conversational AI from IBM since Watson, IBM Research today debuted Project Debater, an experimental conversational AI with a sense of humor, little tact, and occasionally powerful arguments. Training of Project Debater began six years ago, but it only gained an ability to participate in debates with people two years ago, said Noam Slonim, IBM Research principal investigator and creator of Project Debater. Debater's smarts come from hundreds of millions of interactions with millions of journal and newspaper articles. The AI system's ability to deliver persuasive arguments was demonstrated for an audience of tech journalists gathered at IBM offices in San Francisco, where the AI system participated in debates about whether governments should subsidize space exploration and whether telemedicine should play a bigger role in health care. When Project Debater gets a new topic, it searches its corpus of articles for sentences and clauses that are relevant, argumentative, and support its side of the debate.

Don't throw out your CPUs just yet, but there may be a new way to run your neural networks. In the regular world of computing--whether you're running exotic deep-learning algorithms or just using Excel--calculations are usually performed on a processor while data is passed back and forth to the memory. That works perfectly well, but some researchers have argued that performing calculations in memory itself would save time and energy that is usually used to move data around. And that's exactly the concept that a team from IBM Research in Zurich has now applied to some AI algorithms. The team has used a grid of one million memory devices, pictured above, which are all based on a phase-change material called germanium antimony telluride.

The workshop program at the Eleventh Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment was held November 14–15, 2015 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. The program included 4 workshops (one of which was a joint workshop): Artificial Intelligence in Adversarial Real-Time Games, Experimental AI in Games, Intelligent Narrative Technologies and Social Believability in Games, and Player Modeling. This article contains the reports of three of the four workshops.