185 research outputs found
Adapting models of visual aesthetics for personalized content creation
This paper introduces a search-based approach to
personalized content generation with respect to visual aesthetics.
The approach is based on a two-step adaptation procedure
where (1) the evaluation function that characterizes the content
is adjusted to match the visual aesthetics of users and (2) the
content itself is optimized based on the personalized evaluation
function. To test the efficacy of the approach we design fitness
functions based on universal properties of visual perception,
inspired by psychological and neurobiological research. Using
these visual properties we generate aesthetically pleasing 2D
game spaceships via neuroevolutionary constrained optimization
and evaluate the impact of the designed visual properties on the
generated spaceships. The offline generated spaceships are used
as the initial population of an interactive evolution experiment in
which players are asked to choose spaceships according to their
visual taste: the impact of the various visual properties is adjusted
based on player preferences and new content is generated online
based on the updated computational model of visual aesthetics
of the player. Results are presented which show the potential of
the approach in generating content which is based on subjective
criteria of visual aesthetics.Thanks to all the participants of the interactive evolution
experiement. The research was supported, in part, by the
FP7 ICT project SIREN (project no: 258453) and by the
Danish Research Agency, Ministry of Science, Technology
and Innovation project AGameComIn; project number: 274-
09-0083.peer-reviewe
Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC), Settlement Generation Competition
This paper introduces the settlement generation competition for Minecraft,
the first part of the Generative Design in Minecraft challenge. The settlement
generation competition is about creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents
that can produce functional, aesthetically appealing and believable settlements
adapted to a given Minecraft map - ideally at a level that can compete with
human created designs. The aim of the competition is to advance procedural
content generation for games, especially in overcoming the challenges of
adaptive and holistic PCG. The paper introduces the technical details of the
challenge, but mostly focuses on what challenges this competition provides and
why they are scientifically relevant.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Part of the Foundations of Digital Games 2018
proceedings, as part of the workshop on Procedural Content Generatio
Constrained novelty search : a study on game content generation
Novelty search is a recent algorithm geared toward exploring search spaces without regard to objectives. When the presence of constraints divides a search space into feasible space and infeasible space, interesting implications arise regarding how novelty search explores such spaces. This paper elaborates on the problem of constrained novelty search and proposes two novelty search algorithms which search within both the feasible and the infeasible space. Inspired by the FI-2pop genetic algorithm, both algorithms maintain and evolve two separate populations, one with feasible and one with infeasible individuals, while each population can use its own selection method. The proposed algorithms are applied to the problem of generating diverse but playable game levels, which is representative of the larger problem of procedural game content generation. Results show that the two-population constrained novelty search methods can create, under certain conditions, larger and more diverse sets of feasible game levels than current methods of novelty search, whether constrained or unconstrained. However, the best algorithm is contingent on the particularities of the search space and the genetic operators used. Additionally, the proposed enhancement of offspring boosting is shown to enhance performance in all cases of two-population novelty search.peer-reviewe
Modelling affect for horror soundscapes
The feeling of horror within movies or games relies on the audience’s perception of a tense atmosphere — often achieved
through sound accompanied by the on-screen drama — guiding its emotional experience throughout the scene or game-play
sequence. These progressions are often crafted through an a priori knowledge of how a scene or game-play sequence will playout, and
the intended emotional patterns a game director wants to transmit. The appropriate design of sound becomes even more challenging
once the scenery and the general context is autonomously generated by an algorithm. Towards realizing sound-based affective
interaction in games this paper explores the creation of computational models capable of ranking short audio pieces based on
crowdsourced annotations of tension, arousal and valence. Affect models are trained via preference learning on over a thousand
annotations with the use of support vector machines, whose inputs are low-level features extracted from the audio assets of a
comprehensive sound library. The models constructed in this work are able to predict the tension, arousal and valence elicited by
sound, respectively, with an accuracy of approximately 65%, 66% and 72%.peer-reviewe
Toward a common tax regime for the European Union countries
The tax burden on wages, profits, property, and goods or services has a serious impact on cross-country competiveness, something that, in turn, impinges strongly on the actual economy of common markets such as the European Union (EU). While the mobility of productive factors is directly related with country tax-regime differences, government budget funding from tax revenues and rates are the main fiscal policy tools. This article analyzes the trends, similarities and differences between the tax regimes of European Monetary Union (EMU) for the period from1995 to 2019. The methodologies we employ include time series analysis, regression analysis and multivariate cluster analysis. The data are mainly collected from the OECD database and tax revenue departments at country level. We argue that there are significant differences among the tax regimes of EU countries and that no policy has been implemented to ensure tax homogeneity across the EU, nor is there any likelihood of such. The anarchy in fiscal policy is an obstacle for the European Integration. Budget deficits have an impact on taxation and countries, invariably, manage the recent debt crisis by selecting different taxes as fiscal policy tools. Our article presents the differences between tax regimes of EMU countries and shows that the level of economic growth affects the structure of taxes at work and alters the performance of different types of taxes; is also wishes to explain the factors that differentiate tax regimes by using multi dimensional criteria and variance analysis. Our work contributes to the debate toward a common tax regime between EU countries and our analysis is concentrated on this.peer-reviewe
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