Julian Togelius

A new vision of the future of games and game design, enabled by AI. Can games measure intelligence? How will artificial intelligence inform games of the future? In Playing Smart, Julian Togelius explores the connections between games and intelligence to offer a new vision of future games and game design. Video games already depend on AI. We use games to test AI algorithms, challenge our thinking, and better understand both natural and artificial intelligence. In the future, Togelius argues, game designers will be able to create smarter games that make us smarter in turn, applying advanced AI to help design games. In this book, he tells us how. Games are the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. In 1948, Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, handwrote a program for chess. Today we have IBM's Deep Blue and DeepMind's AlphaGo, and huge efforts go into developing AI that can play such arcade games as Pac-Man. Programmers continue to use games to test and develop AI, creating new benchmarks for AI while also challenging human assumptions and cognitive abilities. Game design is at heart a cognitive science, Togelius reminds us—when we play or design a game, we plan, think spatially, make predictions, move, and assess ourselves and our performance. By studying how we play and design games, Togelius writes, we can better understand how humans and machines think. AI can do more for game design than providing a skillful opponent. We can harness it to build game-playing and game-designing AI agents, enabling a new generation of AI-augmented games. With AI, we can explore new frontiers in learning and play.

On Games, Intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence

Playing Smart

Mark J. Nelson

Noor Shaker

This book presents the most up-to-date coverage of procedural content generation (PCG) for games, specifically the procedural generation of levels, landscapes, items, rules, quests, or other types of content. Each chapter explains an algorithm type or domain, including fractal methods, grammar-based methods, search-based and evolutionary methods, constraint-based methods, and narrative, terrain, and dungeon generation. The authors are active academic researchers and game developers, and the book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of courses on games and creativity; game developers who want to learn new methods for content generation; and researchers in related areas of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence.

Procedural Content Generation in Games

Simon M. Lucas

Diego Pérez Liébana

Raluca D. Gaina

Ahmed Khalifa

Jialin Liu

Research on general video game playing aims at designing agents or content generators that can perform well in multiple video games, possibly without knowing the game in advance and with little to no specific domain knowledge. The general video game AI framework and competition propose a challenge in which researchers can test their favorite AI methods with a potentially infinite number of games created using the Video Game Description Language. The open-source framework has been used since 2014 for running a challenge. Competitors around the globe submit their best approaches that aim to generalize well across games. Additionally, the framework has been used in AI modules by many higher-education institutions as assignments, or as proposed projects for final year (undergraduate and Master's) students and Ph.D. candidates. The present book, written by the developers and organizers of the framework, presents the most interesting highlights of the research performed by the authors duringthese years in this domain. It showcases work on methods to play the games, generators of content, and video game optimization. It also outlines potential further work in an area that offers multiple research directions for the future.

General Video Game Artificial Intelligence

Ferrante Neri

Georgios N. Yannakakis

Anna I. Esparcia-Alcázar

Marc Ebner

Stefano Cagnoni

Carlos Cotta

Cecilia Di Chio

Mike Preuss

Hendrik Richter

Aniko Ekart

Juan J. Merelo

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2011, held in Torino, Italy, in April 2011 colocated with the Evo* 2011 events. Thanks to the large number of submissions received, the proceedings for EvoApplications 2011 are divided across two volumes (LNCS 6624 and 6625). The present volume contains contributions for EvoCOMPLEX, EvoGAMES, EvoIASP, EvoINTELLIGENCE, EvoNUM, and EvoSTOC. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. This volume presents an overview about the latest research in EC. Areas where evolutionary computation techniques have been applied range from telecommunication networks to complex systems, finance and economics, games, image analysis, evolutionary music and art, parameter optimization, scheduling, and logistics. These papers may provide guidelines to help new researchers tackling their own problem using EC.

EvoApplications 2011: EvoCOMPLEX, EvoGAMES, EvoIASP, EvoINTELLIGENCE, EvoNUM, and EvoSTOC, Torino, Italy, April 27-29, 2011, Proceedings, Part I

Applications of Evolutionary Computation

Research on general video game playing aims at designing agents or content generators that can perform well in multiple video games, possibly without knowing the game in advance and with little to no specific domain knowledge. The general video game AI framework and competition propose a challenge in which researchers can test their favorite AI methods with a potentially infinite number of games created using the Video Game Description Language. The open-source framework has been used since 2014 for running a challenge. Competitors around the globe submit their best approaches that aim to generalize well across games. Additionally, the framework has been used in AI modules by many higher-education institutions as assignments, or as proposed projects for final year (undergraduate and Master's) students and Ph.D. candidates. The present book, written by the developers and organizers of the framework, presents the most interesting highlights of the research performed by the authors during these years in this domain. It showcases work on methods to play the games, generators of content, and video game optimization. It also outlines potential further work in an area that offers multiple research directions for the future.

Michael Thielscher

Stefan Edelkamp

Tristan Cazenave

Mark H.M. Winands

Stephan Schiffel

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Computer Games Workshop, CGW 2016, and the 5th Workshop on General Intelligence in Game-Playing Agents, GIGA 2016, held in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2016, in New York, USA, in July 2016.The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. The papers address all aspects of artificial intelligence and computer game playing. They discuss topics such as Monte-Carlo methods; heuristic search; board games; card games; video games; perfect and imperfect information games; puzzles and single player games; multi-player games; combinatorial game theory; applications; computational creativity; computational game theory; evaluation and analysis; game design; knowledge representation; machine learning; multi-agent systems; opponent modeling; planning.

5th Workshop on Computer Games, CGW 2016, and 5th Workshop on General Intelligence in Game-Playing Agents, GIGA 2016, Held in Conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2016, New York, USA, July 9-10, 2016, Revised Selected Papers

Computer Games

Chi-Keong Goh

Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques are e?cient, nature-inspired me- ods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their - ciency and simple underlying principles, these methods can be used for a diverse rangeofactivitiesincludingproblemsolving,optimization,machinelearningand pattern recognition. A large and continuously increasing number of researchers and professionals make use of EC techniques in various application domains. This volume presents a careful selection of relevant EC examples combined with a thorough examination of the techniques used in EC. The papers in the volume illustrate the current state of the art in the application of EC and should help and inspire researchers and professionals to develop e?cient EC methods for design and problem solving. All papers in this book were presented during EvoApplications 2010, which included a range of events on application-oriented aspects of EC. Since 1998, EvoApplications — formerly known as EvoWorkshops— has provided a unique opportunity for EC researchers to meet and discuss application aspects of EC and has been an important link between EC research and its application in a variety of domains. During these 12 years, new events have arisen, some have disappeared,whileothershavematuredtobecomeconferencesoftheirown,such as EuroGP in 2000, EvoCOP in 2004, and EvoBIO in 2007. And from this year, EvoApplications has become a conference as well.

EvoApplications 2010: EvoCOMPLEX, EvoGAMES, EvoIASP, EvoINTELLIGENCE, EvoNUM, and EvoSTOC, Istanbul, Turkey, April 7-9, 2010, Proceedings

This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.

Artificial Intelligence and Games

Julian Togelius

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