13,386 research outputs found
Forming Probably Stable Communities with Limited Interactions
A community needs to be partitioned into disjoint groups; each community
member has an underlying preference over the groups that they would want to be
a member of. We are interested in finding a stable community structure: one
where no subset of members wants to deviate from the current structure. We
model this setting as a hedonic game, where players are connected by an
underlying interaction network, and can only consider joining groups that are
connected subgraphs of the underlying graph. We analyze the relation between
network structure, and one's capability to infer statistically stable (also
known as PAC stable) player partitions from data. We show that when the
interaction network is a forest, one can efficiently infer PAC stable coalition
structures. Furthermore, when the underlying interaction graph is not a forest,
efficient PAC stabilizability is no longer achievable. Thus, our results
completely characterize when one can leverage the underlying graph structure in
order to compute PAC stable outcomes for hedonic games. Finally, given an
unknown underlying interaction network, we show that it is NP-hard to decide
whether there exists a forest consistent with data samples from the network.Comment: 11 pages, full version of accepted AAAI-19 pape
Glitchspace:teaching programming through puzzles in cyberspace
There is an increasing need to address the player experience in games-based learning. Whilst games offer enormous potential as learning experiences, the balance between entertainment and education must be carefully designed and delivered. Successful commercial games tend to focus gameplay above any educational aspects. In contrast, games designed for educational purposes have a habit of sacrificing entertainment for educational value which can result in a decline in player engagement. For both, the player experience is critical as it can have a profound effect on both the commercial success of the game and in delivering the educational engagement. As part of an Interface-funded research project Abertay University worked with the independent games company, Space Budgie, to enhance the user experience of their educational game Glitchspace. The game aimed to teach basic coding principles and terminology in an entertaining way. The game sets the player inside a Mondrian-inspired cyberspace world where to progress the player needs to reprogramme the world around them to solve puzzles. The main objective of the academic-industry collaborative project was to analyse the user experience (UX) of the game to increase its educational value for a standalone educational version. The UX design focused on both pragmatic and hedonic qualities such playability, usability and the psychological impact of the game. The empirical study of the UX design allowed all parties to develop a deeper understanding of how the game was being played and the initial reactions to the game by the player. The core research question that the study sought to answer was whether when designing an educational game, UX design could improve philosophical concepts like motivation and engagement to foster better learning experiences.</p
Optimal Partitions in Additively Separable Hedonic Games
We conduct a computational analysis of fair and optimal partitions in
additively separable hedonic games. We show that, for strict preferences, a
Pareto optimal partition can be found in polynomial time while verifying
whether a given partition is Pareto optimal is coNP-complete, even when
preferences are symmetric and strict. Moreover, computing a partition with
maximum egalitarian or utilitarian social welfare or one which is both Pareto
optimal and individually rational is NP-hard. We also prove that checking
whether there exists a partition which is both Pareto optimal and envy-free is
-complete. Even though an envy-free partition and a Nash stable
partition are both guaranteed to exist for symmetric preferences, checking
whether there exists a partition which is both envy-free and Nash stable is
NP-complete.Comment: 11 pages; A preliminary version of this work was invited for
presentation in the session `Cooperative Games and Combinatorial
Optimization' at the 24th European Conference on Operational Research (EURO
2010) in Lisbo
Strategyproof Mechanisms for Additively Separable Hedonic Games and Fractional Hedonic Games
Additively separable hedonic games and fractional hedonic games have received
considerable attention. They are coalition forming games of selfish agents
based on their mutual preferences. Most of the work in the literature
characterizes the existence and structure of stable outcomes (i.e., partitions
in coalitions), assuming that preferences are given. However, there is little
discussion on this assumption. In fact, agents receive different utilities if
they belong to different partitions, and thus it is natural for them to declare
their preferences strategically in order to maximize their benefit. In this
paper we consider strategyproof mechanisms for additively separable hedonic
games and fractional hedonic games, that is, partitioning methods without
payments such that utility maximizing agents have no incentive to lie about
their true preferences. We focus on social welfare maximization and provide
several lower and upper bounds on the performance achievable by strategyproof
mechanisms for general and specific additive functions. In most of the cases we
provide tight or asymptotically tight results. All our mechanisms are simple
and can be computed in polynomial time. Moreover, all the lower bounds are
unconditional, that is, they do not rely on any computational or complexity
assumptions
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Analysing the Role of Interactivity in User Experience
An experimental investigation into the role of interaction in user experience (UX) with a controlled manipulation of interactivity features (e.g. avatars, interactive video) in a university information website is reported. The more interactive version had better affect and hedonic ratings, even though its perceived usability was worse. Analysis of qualitative data showed users were attracted to the interactive features, although they complained about poor usability. The results of the experiments are discussed to consider the role of interactivity in user experience and the differences between users’ quantitative judgements of UX and their comments on interactive features which
reveal different perspectives
Multi-agent Learning For Game-theoretical Problems
Multi-agent systems are prevalent in the real world in various domains. In many multi-agent systems, interaction among agents is inevitable, and cooperation in some form is needed among agents to deal with the task at hand. We model the type of multi-agent systems where autonomous agents inhabit an environment with no global control or global knowledge, decentralized in the true sense. In particular, we consider game-theoretical problems such as the hedonic coalition formation games, matching problems, and Cournot games. We propose novel decentralized learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches to train agents in learning behaviors and adapting to the environments. We use game-theoretic evaluation criteria such as optimality, stability, and resulting equilibria
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