Links 2009-11-01

• Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Games as an Expressive Medium (Youtube):
  

  Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in game design, enabling the creation of believable characters with rich personalities and emotions, interactive story systems that incorporate player interaction into the construction of dynamic plots, and authoring systems that assist human designers in creating games. Games are fast becoming a major medium of the 21st century, being used for everything from education, to editorial news commentary, to expressing public policy and political opinions. Game AI research can radically expand the expressiveness of games, supporting them in becoming a mainstream medium for societal discourse. These ideas will be illustrated by looking at two projects: the interactive drama Façade (released July 2005, downloadable from www.interactivestory.net) and current work on automated game design support.

• Belief-Desire-Intention software model (Wikipedia):
  

  [...] is a software model developed for programming intelligent agents. Superficially characterized by the implementation of an agent’s beliefs, desires and intentions, it actually uses these concepts to solve a particular problem in agent programming. In essence, it provides a mechanism for separating the activity of selecting a plan (from a plan library) from the execution of currently active plans. Consequently, BDI agents are able to balance the time spent on deliberating about plans (choosing what to do) and executing those plans (doing it). A third activity, creating the plans in the first place (planning), is not within the scope of the model, and is left to the system designer and programmer.

• Automated Support for Game Design (Youtube – more detailed version of the second part of the first talk above):
  

  Game designers currently have no formal, abstract tools or representations they can use to reason about designs in progress. This talk describes research in the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz that seeks to build systems that can reason about the consequences of and interactions between game design mechanics, as well as make heuristic game design suggestions. Michael and his team have identified four different design domains that interact during game design, the thematic, abstract mechanics, game state representation, and input mapping domains, and seek to provide semi-automated and automated support to assist with these domains. They have experimented with common-sense reasoning approaches for reasoning about game thematics, and event calculus representations of game mechanics and state representation. This talk provides an overview of the research agenda, present the demo systems they’ve created, and describes the two primary application directions they’re pursuing, namely, design support tools (‘CAD for game designers’) and computer creativity systems that discover new and interesting game mechanics.

• ConceptNet 3 – A Semantic Network Representation of the Open Mind Common Sense Project (MIT):
  

  ConceptNet aims to give computers access to common-sense knowledge, the kind of information that ordinary people know but usually leave unstated.
  The data in ConceptNet is being collected from ordinary people who contributed it over the Web. ConceptNet represents this data in the form of a semantic network, and makes it available to be used in natural language processing and intelligent user interfaces.