Facilitating open plot structures in story driven video games using situation generation

Story driven video games are rising in popularity, along with the players desire to make meaningful choice within the plot and therefore become more involved and immersed within the experience. This paper investigates the problems which arise from implementing interactive narrative within video games and potential techniques to solve those problems. The main focus of the study was the situation generation technique, used to maintain the continuity within open, emergent plot structures, using behaviour trees as a means to implement and traverse plot sequences. The ISGEngine was developed during the course of this study in order to implement and evaluate the situation generation technique

Peer Effects in Higher Education

In this chapter, we describe the potential significance of student peer effects for the economic structure of and behavior in higher education. Their existence would motivate much of the restricted supply, student queuing, and selectivity and institutional competition via merit aid and honors colleges that we see in American higher education; their (appropriate) non-linearity could justify the resulting stratification of higher education as an efficient way to produce human capital. In addition, we use data from the College and Beyond entering class of 1989, combined with phonebook data identifying roommates, to implement a quasi-experimental empirical strategy aimed at measuring peer effects in academic outcomes. In particular, we use data on individual students' grades, SAT scores, and the SAT scores of their roommates at three schools to estimate the effect of roommates' academic characteristics on an individual's grades. The results suggest that, for two of the three schools used, students in the middle of the SAT distribution do somewhat worse in terms of grades if they share a room with a student who is in the bottom 15 percent of the SAT distribution. Students in the top of the SAT distribution appear often not to be affected by the SAT scores of their roommates. These results are similar to those reported in earlier research using data from Williams (Zimmerman) and Dartmouth (Sacerdote).

The effect of background knowledge on young children's comprehension of explicit and implicit information

Bibliography: leaves 15-16Supported in part by the National Institute of Educatio

Inferring Species Trees from Incongruent Multi-Copy Gene Trees Using the Robinson-Foulds Distance

We present a new method for inferring species trees from multi-copy gene trees. Our method is based on a generalization of the Robinson-Foulds (RF) distance to multi-labeled trees (mul-trees), i.e., gene trees in which multiple leaves can have the same label. Unlike most previous phylogenetic methods using gene trees, this method does not assume that gene tree incongruence is caused by a single, specific biological process, such as gene duplication and loss, deep coalescence, or lateral gene transfer. We prove that it is NP-hard to compute the RF distance between two mul-trees, but it is easy to calculate the generalized RF distance between a mul-tree and a singly-labeled tree. Motivated by this observation, we formulate the RF supertree problem for mul-trees (MulRF), which takes a collection of mul-trees and constructs a species tree that minimizes the total RF distance from the input mul-trees. We present a fast heuristic algorithm for the MulRF supertree problem. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the MulRF method produces more accurate species trees than gene tree parsimony methods when incongruence is caused by gene tree error, duplications and losses, and/or lateral gene transfer. Furthermore, the MulRF heuristic runs quickly on data sets containing hundreds of trees with up to a hundred taxa.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure

Mine and me: exploring the neural basis of object ownership.

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