CSM-423 - Evolutionary Solo Pong Players

An Internet Java Applet http://www.cs.essex.ac.uk/staff/poli/ SoloPong/ allows users anywhere to play the Solo Pong game. We compare people?s performance to a hand coded ?Optimal? player and programs automatically produced by artificial intelligence. The AI techniques are: genetic programming, including a hybrid of GP and a human designed algorithm, and a particle swarm optimiser. The AI approaches are not fine tuned. GP and PSO find good players. Evolutionary computation (EC) is able to beat both human designed code and human players

Social interaction design in MMOs

This chapter discusses logics of design implemented within MMO’s to support social interaction. First we try to understand how designers attract players to games that request constant collaboration and cooperation actions to play and progress, and then how do they maintain the interest throughout playing. For the first question we discuss in depth the design for social interdependency, as for the second, we present a study on persuasion techniques used in the design of social game mechanics. We’ve used World of Warcraft as our main case study.(undefined

Silence at the End: How Drosophila Regulates Expression and Transposition of Telomeric Retroelements

The maintenance of chromosome ends in Drosophila is an exceptional phenomenon because it relies on the transposition of specialized retrotransposons rather than on the activity of the enzyme telomerase that maintains telomeres in almost every other eukaryotic species. Sequential transpositions of Het-A, TART, and TAHRE (HTT) onto chromosome ends produce long head-to-tail arrays that are reminiscent to the long arrays of short repeats produced by telomerase in other organisms. Coordinating the activation and silencing of the HTT array with the recruitment of telomere capping proteins favors proper telomere function. However, how this coordination is achieved is not well understood. Like other Drosophila retrotransposons, telomeric elements are regulated by the piRNA pathway. Remarkably, HTT arrays are both source of piRNA and targets of gene silencing thus making the regulation of Drosophila telomeric transposons a unique event among eukaryotes. Herein we will review the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of HTT transcription and transposition and will discuss the possibility of a crosstalk between piRNA mediated regulation, telomeric chromatin establishment and telomere protection

Press Start: Narrative Integration in 16-bit Video Game Music

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on September 8, 2015Thesis advisor: S. Andrew GranadeVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 115-120)Thesis (M.M.)--Conservatory of Music and Dance. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2015Ever since Pong graced the screens of video arcades, one of the most influential interactions between technology and sound has been the video game console. Over the past decade, scholars have begun to recognize this interaction with the steady growth of scholarship on video game sound; however, one group of games, that of the 16-bit generation, has been overlooked. The 16-bit era, roughly spanning from 1988 to 1996, was a period of transition and innovation for the medium. The purpose of this research is to identify the elements of narrative integration of 16-bit video game music. To explore these elements, several games from the 16-bit era are examined. The first chapters discuss the common elements of narrative integration, including musical cohesion, identification, mood evocation, and musical codes. The last half of this research is devoted to in-depth discussion of five games; first, the story-driven genre, the Role Playing Game, is represented by Chrono Trigger and Earthbound. The final chapter gives context to the 16-bit era by looking at three games from The Legend of Zelda series. Narrative integration is discovered to be an evolutionary step in 16-bit video game music. Games of this era were more capable than previous generations of including cohesive musical ideas and identification of areas and characters. Composers used the improved technology of 16-bit systems to create pervasive moods which affected players’ experiences. Finally, musical codes from both film and video games of previous generations were iterated and improved upon. The way in which 16-bit games respond to and utilize elements of narrative integration had implications for the future of game music. Many current trends of contemporary video game music can trace their origins back to the 16-bit era.Press start to begin -- Sound and story -- The Pan is mightier than the sword -- A link between video game worlds -- Epilogu

Paralinguistic vocal control of interactive media: how untapped elements of voice might enhance the role of non-speech voice input in the user's experience of multimedia.

Much interactive media development, especially commercial development, implies the dominance of the visual modality, with sound as a limited supporting channel. The development of multimedia technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality has further revealed a distinct partiality to visual media. Sound, however, and particularly voice, have many aspects which have yet to be adequately investigated. Exploration of these aspects may show that sound can, in some respects, be superior to graphics in creating immersive and expressive interactive experiences. With this in mind, this thesis investigates the use of non-speech voice characteristics as a complementary input mechanism in controlling multimedia applications. It presents a number of projects that employ the paralinguistic elements of voice as input to interactive media including both screen-based and physical systems. These projects are used as a means of exploring the factors that seem likely to affect users’ preferences and interaction patterns during non-speech voice control. This exploration forms the basis for an examination of potential roles for paralinguistic voice input. The research includes the conceptual and practical development of the projects and a set of evaluative studies. The work submitted for Ph.D. comprises practical projects (50 percent) and a written dissertation (50 percent). The thesis aims to advance understanding of how voice can be used both on its own and in combination with other input mechanisms in controlling multimedia applications. It offers a step forward in the attempts to integrate the paralinguistic components of voice as a complementary input mode to speech input applications in order to create a synergistic combination that might let the strengths of each mode overcome the weaknesses of the other

EvolvingBehavior: Towards Co-Creative Evolution of Behavior Trees for Game NPCs

To assist game developers in crafting game NPCs, we present EvolvingBehavior, a novel tool for genetic programming to evolve behavior trees in Unreal Engine 4. In an initial evaluation, we compare evolved behavior to hand-crafted trees designed by our researchers, and to randomly-grown trees, in a 3D survival game. We find that EvolvingBehavior is capable of producing behavior approaching the designer's goals in this context. Finally, we discuss implications and future avenues of exploration for co-creative game AI design tools, as well as challenges and difficulties in behavior tree evolution.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in Foundations of Digital Games 2022 (FDG '22

Co-operative coevolution for computational creativity: a case study In videogame design

The term procedural content generation (PCG) refers to writing software which can synthesise content for a game (or other media such as film) without further intervention from a designer. PCG has become a rich area of research in recent years, finding new ways to apply artificial intelligence to generate high-quality game content such as levels, weapons or puzzles for games. Such research is generally constrained to a single type of content, however, with the assumption that the remainder of the game's design will be fixed by an external designer. Generating many aspects of a game's design simultaneously, perhaps ultimately generating the entirety of a game's design, using PCG is not a well-explored idea. The notion of automated game design is not well-established, and is not seen as a task distinct from simply performing lots of PCG tasks at the same time. In particular, the high-level design tasks guiding the creative direction of a game are all but completely absent in PCG literature, because it is rare that a designer wishes to hand over such responsibility to a PCG system. We present here ANGELINA, an automated game designer that has developed games using a multi-faceted approach to content generation underpinned by a co-operative co-evolutionary approach which breaks down a game design into several distinct tasks, each of which controlled by an evolutionary subsystem within ANGELINA. We will show that this approach works well to automate game design, can be ported across many game engines and game genres, and can be enhanced and extended using novel computational creativity techniques to give the system a heightened sense of autonomy and independence.Open Acces

Montana Kaimin, September 21, 2012

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/6608/thumbnail.jp