Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people interested in conceptual questions about life and challenges in a world where "cognitive" functions can be mimicked in purely digital environment. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In the recent festival of science, there was a talk given by researcher Mike Cook about:
ANGELINA, an AI game designer that has invented game mechanics, made games about news stories, and was the first AI to enter a game jam.
So the aim of Angelina AI is basically to design videogames.
Briefly, how exactly does Angelina design the new games? How does it work behind the scenes?
In any case, it appears that much of his past work on Github involves procedural generation. Which is AI... ish. Unless there's more to it, which we can't see because half the site is down.
This paper appears to offer an analysis of combining procedural generation with game AI.
From the abstract:
Populated and immersive game contexts require large numbers of minor, background characters to fill out the virtual environment. To limit game AI development effort, however, such characters are typically represented by very simplistic AI with either little difference between characters or only highly formulaic variations. Here we describe a complete workflow and framework for easily designing, generating and incorporating multiple, interesting game AIs. Our approach uses high-level, visual Statechart models to represent behaviour in a modular form; this allows for not only simplistic, parameterbased variation in AI design, but also permits more complex structure-based approaches. We demonstrate our technique by applying it to the task of generating a large number of individual AIs for computer-controlled squirrels within the Mammoth 1 framework for game research. Rapid development and easy deployment of AIs allow us to create a wide variety of interesting AIs, greatly improving the sense of immersion in a virtual environment.
Here's an article from 2015 on AI and procedural generation, which discusses Angelina at length. This article links to a more in-depth article from 2013.
Here's an excerpt:
Cook gave ANGELINA the ability to learn about people so that it could make games based on current events. Then Cook gave ANGELINA memory - that is, the ability to keep track of the people it had learned about. The memory's not a big deal, even though it led to a number of philosophical disagreements around Cook's desk. ANGELINA's memory is actually just a text file where it stores the names of all the people it's heard of, alongside a number: a measure of its opinion of them based on the things it's learned from internet chatter. It liked Al-Assad more than May. It liked everyone more than May.
