Generation and Analysis of Content for Physics-Based Video Games

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that can assist with the creation and analysis of digital content is a broad and challenging task for researchers. This topic has been most prevalent in the field of game AI research, where games are used as a testbed for solving more complex real-world problems. One of the major issues with prior AI-assisted content creation methods for games has been a lack of direct comparability to real-world environments, particularly those with realistic physical properties to consider. Creating content for such environments typically requires physics-based reasoning, which imposes many additional complications and restrictions that must be considered. Addressing and developing methods that can deal with these physical constraints, even if they are only within simulated game environments, is an important and challenging task for AI techniques that intend to be used in real-world situations. The research presented in this thesis describes several approaches to creating and analysing levels for the physics-based puzzle game Angry Birds, which features a realistic 2D environment. This research was multidisciplinary in nature and covers a wide variety of different AI fields, leading to this thesis being presented as a compilation of published work. The central part of this thesis consists of procedurally generating levels for physics-based games similar to those in Angry Birds. This predominantly involves creating and placing stable structures made up of many smaller blocks, as well as other level elements. Multiple approaches are presented, including both fully autonomous and human-AI collaborative methodologies. In addition, several analyses of Angry Birds levels were carried out using current state-of-the-art agents. A hyper-agent was developed that uses machine learning to estimate the performance of each agent in a portfolio for an unknown level, allowing it to select the one most likely to succeed. Agent performance on levels that contain deceptive or creative properties was also investigated, allowing determination of the current strengths and weaknesses of different AI techniques. The observed variability in performance across levels for different AI techniques led to the development of an adaptive level generation system, allowing for the dynamic creation of increasingly challenging levels over time based on agent performance analysis. An additional study also investigated the theoretical complexity of Angry Birds levels from a computational perspective. While this research is predominately applied to video games with physics-based simulated environments, the challenges and problems solved by the proposed methods also have significant real-world potential and applications

Real-Time Storytelling with Events in Virtual Worlds

We present an accessible interactive narrative tool for creating stories among a virtual populace inhabiting a fully-realized 3D virtual world. Our system supports two modalities: assisted authoring where a human storyteller designs stories using a storyboard-like interface called CANVAS, and exploratory authoring where a human author experiences a story as it happens in real-time and makes on-the-fly narrative trajectory changes using a tool called Storycraft. In both cases, our system analyzes the semantic content of the world and the narrative being composed, and provides automated assistance such as completing partially-specified stories with causally complete sequences of intermediate actions. At its core, our system revolves around events -â?? pre-authored multi-actor task sequences describing interactions between groups of actors and props. These events integrate complex animation and interaction tasks with precision control and expose them as atoms of narrative significance to the story direction systems. Events are an accessible tool and conceptual metaphor for assembling narrative arcs, providing a tightly-coupled solution to the problem of converting author intent to real-time animation synthesis. Our system allows simple and straightforward macro- and microscopic control over large numbers of virtual characters with diverse and sophisticated behavior capabilities, and reduces the complicated action space of an interactive narrative by providing analysis and user assistance in the form of semi-automation and recommendation services

Playful mapping in the digital age:The Playful Mapping Collective

From Mah-Jong, to the introduction of Prussian war-games, through to the emergence of location-based play: maps and play share a long and diverse history. This monograph shows how mapping and playing unfold in the digital age, when the relations between these apparently separate tropes are increasingly woven together. Fluid networks of interaction have encouraged a proliferation of hybrid forms of mapping and playing and a rich plethora of contemporary case-studies, ranging from fieldwork, golf, activism and automotive navigation, to pervasive and desktop-based games evidences this trend. Examining these cases shows how mapping and playing can form productive synergies, but also encourages new ways of being, knowing and shaping our everyday lives. The chapters in this book explore how play can be more than just an object or practice, and instead focus on its potential as a method for understanding maps and spatiality. They show how playing and mapping can be liberating, dangerous, subversive and performative

Cognitive Architectures for Serious Games

This dissertation summarises a research path aimed at fostering the use of Cognitive Architectures in Serious Games research field. Cognitive Architectures are an embodiment of scientific hypotheses and theories aimed at capturing the mechanisms of cognition that are considered consistent over time and independent of specific tasks or domains. The theoretical approaches provided by the research in computational cognitive modelling have been used to formalise a methodological framework to guide researchers and experts in the game-based education sector in designing, implementing, and evaluating Serious Games. The investigation of cognitive processes involved during the game experience represents the fundamental step of the pro- posed approach. Two different case studies are described to discuss the possible use of the suggested framework. In the first case study, the aim was to design a modified version of the Tetris game with the intention of making the game more effective in training the visual-spatial skill called mental rotation. In the second scenario, the frame- work was used as a basis for creating an innovative persuasive game. This case study provides an example of adopting cognitive architectures for implementing a non-player character with human-like behaviour developed using targeted cognitive theories

Structured Approaches for Exploring Interpersonal Relationships in Natural Language Text

Human relationships have long been studied by scientists from domains like sociology, psychology, literature, etc. for understanding people's desires, goals, actions and expected behaviors. In this dissertation we study inter-personal relationships as expressed in natural language text. Modeling inter-personal relationships from text finds application in general natural language understanding, as well as real-world domains such as social networks, discussion forums, intelligent virtual agents, etc. We propose that the study of relationships should incorporate not only linguistic cues in text, but also the contexts in which these cues appear. Our investigations, backed by empirical evaluation, support this thesis, and demonstrate that the task benefits from using structured models that incorporate both types of information. We present such structured models to address the task of modeling the nature of relationships between any two given characters from a narrative. To begin with, we assume that relationships are of two types: cooperative and non-cooperative. We first describe an approach to jointly infer relationships between all characters in the narrative, and demonstrate how the task of characterizing the relationship between two characters can benefit from including information about their relationships with other characters in the narrative. We next formulate the relationship-modeling problem as a sequence prediction task to acknowledge the evolving nature of human relationships, and demonstrate the need to model the history of a relationship in predicting its evolution. Thereafter, we present a data-driven method to automatically discover various types of relationships such as familial, romantic, hostile, etc. Like before, we address the task of modeling evolving relationships but don't restrict ourselves to two types of relationships. We also demonstrate the need to incorporate not only local historical but also global context while solving this problem. Lastly, we demonstrate a practical application of modeling inter-personal relationships in the domain of online educational discussion forums. Such forums offer opportunities for its users to interact and form deeper relationships. With this view, we address the task of identifying initiation of such deeper relationships between a student and the instructor. Specifically, we analyze contents of the forums to automatically suggest threads to the instructors that require their intervention. By highlighting scenarios that need direct instructor-student interactions, we alleviate the need for the instructor to manually peruse all threads of the forum and also assist students who have limited avenues for communicating with instructors. We do this by incorporating the discourse structure of the thread through latent variables that abstractly represent contents of individual posts and model the flow of information in the thread. Such latent structured models that incorporate the linguistic cues without losing their context can be helpful in other related natural language understanding tasks as well. We demonstrate this by using the model for a very different task: identifying if a stated desire has been fulfilled by the end of a story

Evolutionary Computation 2020

Intelligent optimization is based on the mechanism of computational intelligence to refine a suitable feature model, design an effective optimization algorithm, and then to obtain an optimal or satisfactory solution to a complex problem. Intelligent algorithms are key tools to ensure global optimization quality, fast optimization efficiency and robust optimization performance. Intelligent optimization algorithms have been studied by many researchers, leading to improvements in the performance of algorithms such as the evolutionary algorithm, whale optimization algorithm, differential evolution algorithm, and particle swarm optimization. Studies in this arena have also resulted in breakthroughs in solving complex problems including the green shop scheduling problem, the severe nonlinear problem in one-dimensional geodesic electromagnetic inversion, error and bug finding problem in software, the 0-1 backpack problem, traveler problem, and logistics distribution center siting problem. The editors are confident that this book can open a new avenue for further improvement and discoveries in the area of intelligent algorithms. The book is a valuable resource for researchers interested in understanding the principles and design of intelligent algorithms

Applicazione del Digital Storytelling come risorsa per il Digital Heritage Italiano

La ricerca si \ue8 concentrata sulla valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale italiano, che \ue8 stata presentata analizzando i prodotti digitali per la valorizzazione del cultural heritage realizzati nel 2015, e pensati per un pubblico non specializzato, che sono stati categorizzati in maniera tale da individuare le tendenze di sviluppo, e come e con quale grado di frequenza \ue8 stato incorporato lo storytelling all\u2019interno delle esperienze interattive per la promozione culturale. Nell\u2019analisi dell\u2019ampia letteratura sul digital heritage e sullo storytelling, sono stati selezionati i testi sulla base della loro rilevanza storica, e della coerenza tra le ipotesi di partenza, i dati presentati, e le recenti innovazioni tecnologiche in campo digitale. Analizzando i prodotti per il digital heritage sviluppati per la promozione, e non esclusivamente per la conservazione, del patrimonio culturale per un pubblico non specializzato che possiedono anche una dimensione interattiva sono state individuate tre categorie, quella dei musei virtuali, delle esibizioni culturali, e dei serious game, che descrivono i prodotti digitali realizzati in Italia nel 2015 per la promozione del cultural heritage. Per ogni categoria \ue8 stato presentato uno studio di caso specifico che esemplifica le caratteristiche individuate nelle categorie proposte. L\u2019analisi dei legami tra storytelling e serious games ha portato alla luce una serie di problematiche e criticit\ue0, in particolare nel rapporto tra l\u2019agency del videogiocatore e una struttura narrativa fortemente vincolante. Per superare questo problema, \ue8 stato proposto l\u2019utilizzo dei drama manager, software in grado di \u201cprevedere\u201d e controllare le scelte del videogiocatore, che potrebbero, anche nel caso del digital heritage, limitare i comportamenti distruttivi, che sono antitetici ai valori positivi che si accompagnano alla valorizzazione culturale, e al contempo salvaguardare quantomeno il senso di agency del videogiocatore. L\u2019analisi dei virtual enviroments e dell\u2019evoluzione di concetti come presence, agency, flow, enjoyment ha permesso di dimostrare come il ruolo dell\u2019utente, nel caso del digital heritage il visitatore, sia centrale per creare enriched spaces in grado di generare coinvolgimento nell\u2019utente. La riflessione sulle dimensioni, o livelli, dell\u2019esperienza, visceral, behavioral e reflective e i loro rapporto con l\u2019approccio estetico, pragmatico, olistico ed emotivo al design dell\u2019interazione, la definizione dell\u2019emotional, behavioral ed experience centered design hanno dimostrato come esistano modelli validi, anche se non definitivi, per analizzare il comportamento dell\u2019utente, e le modalit\ue0 con cui quest\u2019ultimo percepir\ue0 e comunicher\ue0 l\u2019esperienza che sta vivendo. L\u2019analisi del digital heritage italiano ha presentato un quadro in qualche modo positivo, che per\uf2 tradisce ancora alcune problematiche che sono il sintomo di un potenziale ancora inespresso. L\u2019analisi della promozione attraverso il web e i canali social ha messo in evidenza come le prestazioni delle istituzioni italiane siano decisamente inferiori rispetto ad altre realt\ue0 europee, nonostante diverse survey, compiute sia a livello italiano che europeo, dimostrino come gli utenti italiani utilizzino con regolarit\ue0 gli strumenti web e social, in misura anche maggiore rispetto alla media europea

Proceedings of the 2021 DigitalFUTURES

This open access book is a compilation of selected papers from 2021 DigitalFUTURES—The 3rd International Conference on Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication (CDRF 2021). The work focuses on novel techniques for computational design and robotic fabrication. The contents make valuable contributions to academic researchers, designers, and engineers in the industry. As well, readers encounter new ideas about understanding material intelligence in architecture