Knowledge acquisition for adaptive game AI

Publication Type  Journal Article
Year of Publication  2007
Authors  Marc Ponsen; Héctor Muñoz-Avila; Pieter Spronck; David W. Aha
Journal Title  Science of Computer Programming
Volume  67
Pagination  59-75
Key Words  Artificial intelligence; Computer games; Dynamic scripting; Evolutionary algorithm; Knowledge acquisition; Real-time strategy; Reinforcement learning
Abstract  

Game artificial intelligence (AI) controls the decision-making process of computer-controlled opponents in computer games. Adaptive game AI (i.e., game AI that can automatically adapt the behaviour of the computer players to changes in the environment) can increase the entertainment value of computer games. Successful adaptive game AI is invariably based on the game's domain knowledge. We show that an offline evolutionary algorithm can learn important domain knowledge in the form of game tactics (i.e., a sequence of game actions) for dynamic scripting, an offline algorithm inspired by reinforcement learning approaches that we use to create adaptive game AI. We compare the performance of dynamic scripting under three conditions for defeating non-adaptive opponents in a real-time strategy game. In the first condition, we manually encode its tactics. In the second condition, we manually translate the tactics learned by the evolutionary algorithm, and use them for dynamic scripting. In the third condition, this translation is automated. We found that dynamic scripting performs best under the third condition, and both of the latter conditions outperform manual tactic encoding. We discuss the implications of these results, and the performance of dynamic scripting for adaptive game AI from the perspective of machine learning research and commercial game development.


0

Free Registration

Registered users have the added benefit of being able to:

  • Search/filter the bibliography to find just the article you are looking for. You can search the computer games research bibliography by author, year, keyword, title or publication type.
  • Export references from the video games bibliography to a format suitable for your own work. Options currently include tagged and XML for Endnote users and BibTex for the rest of the world.
  • Post comments to discuss the paper or alert fellow researchers to other resources.
  • Add their own references using the 'create content' -> 'biblio' option in the block on the left.
  • NEW: Use the Biblio Search box located on the right hand of the page.
  • NEW: Browse by journal title, book title, author or keyword using the new Faceted Search tool.