Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques enable automatic creation of diverse and complex environments. While PCG facilitates more efficient content creation, ensuring consistently high-quality, industry-standard content remains a significant challenge. In this research, we propose a method to identify and repair unstable levels generated by existing PCG models. We use Angry Birds as a case study, demonstrating our method on game levels produced by established PCG approaches. Our method leverages object segmentation and visual analysis of level images to detect structural gaps and perform targeted repairs. We evaluate multiple object segmentation models and select the most effective one as the basis for our repair pipeline. Experimental results show that our method improves the stability and playability of AI-generated levels. Although our evaluation is specific to Angry Birds, our image-based approach is designed to be applicable to a wide range of 2D games with similar level structures.

We present an efficient and generalised procedure to accurately identify the best performing algorithm for each sub-task in a multi-problem domain. Our approach treats this as a set of best arm identification problems for multi-armed bandits, where each bandit corresponds to a specific task and each arm corresponds to a specific algorithm or agent. We propose an optimistic selection process based on the Wilson score interval (Optimistic-WS) that ranks each arm across all bandits in terms of their potential regret reduction. We evaluate the performance of Optimistic-WS on two of the most popular general game domains, the General Video Game AI (GVGAI) framework and the Ludii general game playing system, with the goal of identifying the highest performing agent for each game within a limited number of trials. Compared to previous best arm identification algorithms for multi-armed bandits, our results demonstrate a substantial performance improvement in terms of average simple regret. This novel approach can be used to significantly improve the quality and accuracy of agent evaluation procedures for general game frameworks, as well as other multi-task domains with high algorithm runtimes.

This week, leaders across Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., Wall Street, and beyond have been thrown into disarray due to the unexpected rise of the Chinese AI company DeepSeek. DeepSeek recently released AI models that rivaled OpenAI's, seemingly for a fraction of the price, and despite American policy designed to slow China's progress. As a result, many analysts concluded that DeepSeek's success undermined the core beliefs driving the American AI industry--and that the companies leading this charge, like Nvidia and Microsoft, were not as valuable or technologically ahead as previously believed. Tech stocks dropped hundreds of billions of dollars in days. But AI scientists have pushed back, arguing that many of those fears are exaggerated.

Amazon's drones won't be making any deliveries in the foreseeable future. According to Bloomberg, the company has paused all commercial drone deliveries in Texas and Arizona after a previously undisclosed event in which two of Amazon's MK30 drones had crashed at the Pendleton, Oregon airport it uses for testing. MK30 is the company's next-gen drone model, which is lighter and has a longer range than its predecessor, the MK27. The incidents took place in December, with one of the drones even catching fire after it fell. Amazon reportedly determined that its drones crashed due a software issue that's linked to the light rain drizzling at the time the tests were being conducted.

Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term "metaverse", and was one of Mark Zuckerberg's pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson's fictional world in reality. The plot revolves around an image that, when viewed in the metaverse, hijacks the viewer's brain, maiming or killing them. In the fiction of the world, the image crashes the brain, presenting it with an input that simply cannot be correctly processed. Perhaps the first clear example came four years earlier, in British SF writer David Langford's short story BLIT, which imagines a terrorist attack using a "basilisk", images which contain "implicit programs which the human equipment cannot safely run". In a sequel to that story, published in Nature in 1999, Langford draws earlier parallels, even pulling in Monty Python's Flying Circus, "with its famous sketch about the World's Funniest Joke that causes all hearers to laugh themselves to death".

Science fiction, when revisited years later, sometimes doesn't come across as all that fictional. Speculative novels have an impressive track record at prophesying what innovations are to come, and how they might upend the world: H. G. Wells wrote about an atomic bomb decades before World War II, and Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, features devices we'd describe today as Bluetooth earbuds. Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. A core element of one of his early novels, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a magical book that acts as a personal tutor and mentor for a young girl, adapting to her learning style--in essence, it is a personalized and ultra-advanced chatbot.

The other night, I had an odd conversation with ChatGPT, made somewhat stranger because the AI's answers came out of a humanoid rabbit idly sucking on a juice box. He was standing alone in a virtual novelty store in Second Life, where he had recently been fired. The rabbit, the shop owner explained to me later, was meant to be a clerk, "but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale." So the rabbit had been demoted to the role of greeter, chatting with customers about the nature of comedy, his own existence, or whatever else they cared to ask. BunnyGPT is among the first bots in the virtual world to have its "mind" wired to OpenAI's large language model.

The wreck of the ill-fated Titanic ocean liner has been visualised in full for the first time as part of what researchers say is the "largest underwater scanning project in history". The first full-sized 3D scan of the Titanic shipwreck, published on Wednesday, may reveal more details about the ship's fateful journey across the Atlantic more than a century ago. The model was created with data using deep-sea mapping gathered by two submersibles – named Romeo and Juliet – during a six-week expedition to the North Atlantic wreck site in summer 2022. In all, the mission gathered 16TB of data from the wreckage that lies at a depth of nearly 4,000 metres (13,123 feet). The high-resolution images, published by the BBC, reconstruct the wreck in great detail.

The perfect version of the metaverse, to hear tech heads like Mark Zuckerberg tell it, marries social media, entertainment, and--most exciting of all--meetings in one pristine virtual space. Long ago foretold in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, it is a place where the online world offers more experiences than the flesh-and-bone one. But whereas Stephenson's metaverse was part of an apocalyptic future, modern inventors have promised a digital utopia. Unfortunately, the metaverse they've built has, so far, lived up to those expectations about as well as a Craigslist apartment rented based on photos alone. Zuckerberg's Horizon Worlds, clunky and strange, may have been at its most thrilling when Meta informed users that legs for their avatars were "coming soon."

This paper presents a general approach for measuring distances between board games within the Ludii general game system. These distances are calculated using a previously published set of general board game concepts, each of which represents a common game idea or shared property. Our results compare and contrast two different measures of distance, highlighting the subjective nature of such metrics and discussing the different ways that they can be interpreted.