How the Nintendo generation learns

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87319/2/361_1.pd

Generating Levels That Teach Mechanics

The automatic generation of game tutorials is a challenging AI problem. While it is possible to generate annotations and instructions that explain to the player how the game is played, this paper focuses on generating a gameplay experience that introduces the player to a game mechanic. It evolves small levels for the Mario AI Framework that can only be beaten by an agent that knows how to perform specific actions in the game. It uses variations of a perfect A* agent that are limited in various ways, such as not being able to jump high or see enemies, to test how failing to do certain actions can stop the player from beating the level.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, PCG Workshop at FDG 2018, 9th International Workshop on Procedural Content Generation (PCG2018

VGM-RNN: Recurrent Neural Networks for Video Game Music Generation

The recent explosion of interest in deep neural networks has affected and in some cases reinvigorated work in fields as diverse as natural language processing, image recognition, speech recognition and many more. For sequence learning tasks, recurrent neural networks and in particular LSTM-based networks have shown promising results. Recently there has been interest – for example in the research by Google’s Magenta team – in applying so-called “language modeling” recurrent neural networks to musical tasks, including for the automatic generation of original music. In this work we demonstrate our own LSTM-based music language modeling recurrent network. We show that it is able to learn musical features from a MIDI dataset and generate output that is musically interesting while demonstrating features of melody, harmony and rhythm. We source our dataset from VGMusic.com, a collection of user-submitted MIDI transcriptions of video game songs, and attempt to generate output which emulates this kind of music

Stochastic Resonance Can Drive Adaptive Physiological Processes

Stochastic resonance (SR) is a concept from the physics and engineering communities that has applicability to both systems physiology and other living systems. In this paper, it will be argued that stochastic resonance plays a role in driving behavior in neuromechanical systems. The theory of stochastic resonance will be discussed, followed by a series of expected outcomes, and two tests of stochastic resonance in an experimental setting. These tests are exploratory in nature, and provide a means to parameterize systems that couple biological and mechanical components. Finally, the potential role of stochastic resonance in adaptive physiological systems will be discussed

SemAxis: A Lightweight Framework to Characterize Domain-Specific Word Semantics Beyond Sentiment

Because word semantics can substantially change across communities and contexts, capturing domain-specific word semantics is an important challenge. Here, we propose SEMAXIS, a simple yet powerful framework to characterize word semantics using many semantic axes in word- vector spaces beyond sentiment. We demonstrate that SEMAXIS can capture nuanced semantic representations in multiple online communities. We also show that, when the sentiment axis is examined, SEMAXIS outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in building domain-specific sentiment lexicons.Comment: Accepted in ACL 2018 as a full pape