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 interactive digital entertainment conference


Player-Centered AI for Automatic Game Personalization: Open Problems

Zhu, Jichen, Ontañón, Santiago

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A significant amount of research has been devoted to automatic personalization in digital applications, especially in Internet applications Computer games represent an ideal research domain for the next [8]. As the content of the Internet services grows, personalized generation of personalized digital applications. This paper presents applications such as recommendation systems help to mitigate information a player-centered framework of AI for game personalization, complementary overload and decision fatigue [8]. This body of work to the commonly used system-centered approaches.


Generating Interactive Worlds with Text

Fan, Angela, Urbanek, Jack, Ringshia, Pratik, Dinan, Emily, Qian, Emma, Karamcheti, Siddharth, Prabhumoye, Shrimai, Kiela, Douwe, Rocktaschel, Tim, Szlam, Arthur, Weston, Jason

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Procedurally generating cohesive and interesting game environments is challenging and time-consuming. In order for the relationships between the game elements to be natural, common-sense has to be encoded into arrangement of the elements. In this work, we investigate a machine learning approach for world creation using content from the multi-player text adventure game environment LIGHT. We introduce neural network based models to compositionally arrange locations, characters, and objects into a coherent whole. In addition to creating worlds based on existing elements, our models can generate new game content. Humans can also leverage our models to interactively aid in worldbuilding. We show that the game environments created with our approach are cohesive, diverse, and preferred by human evaluators compared to other machine learning based world construction algorithms.


Experience Management in Multi-player Games

Zhu, Jichen, Ontañón, Santiago

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Experience Management studies AI systems that automatically adapt interactive experiences such as games to tailor to specific players and to fulfill design goals. Although it has been explored for several decades, existing work in experience management has mostly focused on single-player experiences. This paper is a first attempt at identifying the main challenges to expand EM to multi-player/multi-user games or experiences. We also make connections to related areas where solutions for similar problems have been proposed (especially group recommender systems) and discusses the potential impact and applications of multi-player EM.


Reports

AI Magazine

The IJCAI-09 Workshop on Learning Structural Knowledge from Observations (STRUCK-09) took place as part of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09) on July 12 in Pasadena, California. The workshop program included paper presentations, discussion sessions about those papers, group discussions about two selected topics, and a joint discussion. As a result, many cognitive architectures use structural models to represent relations between knowledge of different complexity. Structural modeling has led to a number of representation and reasoning formalisms including frames, schemas, abstractions, hierarchical task networks (HTNs), and goal graphs among others. 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.


1965

AI Magazine

Over the past decade, the commercial games industry has come to realize the importance of AI to its next-generation products. Similarly, the academic community now recognizes the interesting research challenges of game AI. AAAI responded to this interest with the creation in 2005 of the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference series. The third AIIDE conference was held in June 2007 and was a great success. It featured 10 (!) invited speakers and attracted an excellent mix of academic researchers and industry practitioners.


Recap of the 2010 AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference

AI Magazine

The conference is targeted at the research and commercial communities, promoting AI research and practice in the context of interactive digital entertainment systems with an emphasis on commercial video games. AIIDE 2010 was held October 11-13, 2010, at Stanford University ajacent to Palo Alto, California. The conference featured 17 paper presentations, 18 posters, 5 demos, 5 invited speakers, a panel on teaching game AI in academe, and the first StarCraft AI competition. Led by the conference chair, Michael Youngblood (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), and the program chair, Vadim Bulitko (University of Alberta), the three days of AIIDE contained a dense and exciting agenda highlighting new research and revealing how AI is applied in many commercial endeavors. The first day was kicked off with an invited talk from Chris Jurney, lead developer of Double Fine Productions, who detailed his work on the nonplayer character pathfinding of Dawn of War II during his time at Relic Entertainment.


Automatic Learning of Combat Models for RTS Games

Uriarte, Alberto (Drexel University) | Ontañón, Santiago (Drexel University)

AAAI Conferences

Game tree search algorithms, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), require access to a forward model (or "simulator") of the game at hand. However, in some games such forward model is not readily available. In this paper we address the problem of automatically learning forward models (more specifically, combats models) for two-player attrition games. We report experiments comparing several approaches to learn such combat model from replay data to models generated by hand. We use StarCraft, a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game, as our application domain. Specifically, we use a large collection of already collected replays, and focus on learning a combat model for tactical combats.


Recap of the 2010 AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference

Youngblood, G. Michael (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) | Bulitko, Vadim (University of Alberta) | Weber, Ben (University of California, Santa Cruz)

AI Magazine

AIIDE 2010 was held October 11-13, 2010, at Stanford University ajacent to Palo Alto, California. The conference featured 17 paper presentations, 18 posters, 5 demos, 5 invited speakers, a panel on teaching game AI in academe, and the first StarCraft AI competition. Led by the conference chair, Michael Youngblood (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), and the program chair, Vadim Bulitko (University of Alberta), the three days of AIIDE contained a dense and exciting agenda highlighting new research and revealing how AI is applied in many commercial endeavors. The first day was kicked off with an invited talk from Chris Jurney, lead developer of Double Fine Productions, who detailed his work on the nonplayer character pathfinding of Dawn of War II during his time at Relic Entertainment. The morning was completed by research presentations on behavioral techniques with notable work on producing realistic behaviors through alibi generation (Ben Sunshine-Hill and Norman Badler, University of Pennsylvania), which has been widely discussed in the community since, and Ben Weber's (University of California, Santa Cruz) work applying goal-driven autonomy to playing StarCraft (awarded AIIDE 2010 Best Student Paper).


Learning Companion Behaviors Using Reinforcement Learning in Games

Sharifi, AmirAli (University of Alberta) | Zhao, Richard (University of Alberta) | Szafron, Duane A. (University of Alberta)

AAAI Conferences

Our goal is to enable Non Player Characters (NPC) in computer games to exhibit natural behaviors. The quality of behaviors affects the game experience especially in story-based games, which rely on player-NPC interactions. We used Reinforcement Learning to enable NPC companions to develop preferences for actions. We implemented our RL technique in BioWare Corp.’s Neverwinter Nights. Our experiments evaluate an NPC companion’s behaviors regarding traps. Our method enables NPCs to rapidly learn reasonable behaviors and adapt to changes in the game.


The IJCAI-09 Workshop on Learning Structural Knowledge From Observations (STRUCK-09)

Kuter, Ugur (University of Maryland) | Munoz-Avila, Hector (Lehigh University)

AI Magazine

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.