The True Destination of EGO is Multi-local Optimization

Efficient global optimization is a popular algorithm for the optimization of expensive multimodal black-box functions. One important reason for its popularity is its theoretical foundation of global convergence. However, as the budgets in expensive optimization are very small, the asymptotic properties only play a minor role and the algorithm sometimes comes off badly in experimental comparisons. Many alternative variants have therefore been proposed over the years. In this work, we show experimentally that the algorithm instead has its strength in a setting where multiple optima are to be identified

Social Bots: Human-Like by Means of Human Control?

Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their application is even suspected to be partly responsible for recent election results. Astonishingly, the term `Social Bot' is not well defined and different scientific disciplines use divergent definitions. This work starts with a balanced definition attempt, before providing an overview of how social bots actually work (taking the example of Twitter) and what their current technical limitations are. Despite recent research progress in Deep Learning and Big Data, there are many activities bots cannot handle well. We then discuss how bot capabilities can be extended and controlled by integrating humans into the process and reason that this is currently the most promising way to go in order to realize effective interactions with other humans.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figure

From Chess and Atari to StarCraft and Beyond: How Game AI is Driving the World of AI

This paper reviews the field of Game AI, which not only deals with creating agents that can play a certain game, but also with areas as diverse as creating game content automatically, game analytics, or player modelling. While Game AI was for a long time not very well recognized by the larger scientific community, it has established itself as a research area for developing and testing the most advanced forms of AI algorithms and articles covering advances in mastering video games such as StarCraft 2 and Quake III appear in the most prestigious journals. Because of the growth of the field, a single review cannot cover it completely. Therefore, we put a focus on important recent developments, including that advances in Game AI are starting to be extended to areas outside of games, such as robotics or the synthesis of chemicals. In this article, we review the algorithms and methods that have paved the way for these breakthroughs, report on the other important areas of Game AI research, and also point out exciting directions for the future of Game AI

An empirical investigation of simplified step-size adapatation in evolution strategies with a view to theory

Randomized direct-search methods for the optimization of a function f: R^n -> R given by a black box for f-evaluations are investigated. We consider the cumulative step-size adaptation (CSA) for the variance of multivariate zero-mean normal distributions. Those are commonly used to sample new candidate solutions within metaheuristics, in particular within the CMA Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), a state-of-the-art direct-search method. Though the CMA-ES is very successful in practical optimization, its theoretical foundations are very limited because of the complex stochastic process it induces. To forward the theory on this successful method, we propose two simplifications of the CSA used within CMA-ES for step-size control. We show by experimental and statistical evaluation that they perform sufficiently similarly to the original CSA (in the considered scenario), so that a further theoretical analysis is in fact reasonable. Furthermore, we outline in detail a probabilistic/theoretical runtime analysis for one of the two CSA-derivatives

RedTNet: A network model for strategy games

In this work, we develop a simple, graph-based framework, RedTNet, for computational modeling of strategy games and simulations. The framework applies the concept of red teaming as a means by which to explore alternative strategies. We show how the model supports computer-based red teaming in several applications: realtime strategy games and critical infrastructure protection, using an evolutionary algorithm to automatically detect good and often surprising strategies