Can We Create Fun Games Automatically? 198
togelius writes "What makes games fun? Some (e.g. Raph Koster) claim that fun is learning — fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve. I think we can create fun game rules automatically through measuring their learnability. In a recent experiment, we do this using evolutionary computation, and create some simple Pacman-like new games completely without human intervention! Perhaps this has a future in game design? The academic paper (PDF) is available as well."
So Yankish... (Score:3, Insightful)
You want your creativity to be automated?
You desserve what you'll get, welcome to your dump...
Hope the rest of the world will leave you there, for once.
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Why this was modded -1 is beyond me - it's true.
From the Internet bubble to the housing bubble, it's all been "let me have it all without having to work."
Sure, this can create a bunch of derivative games ... so you'll end up with 50 variants of tetris, 40 of scrabble, maybe they'll even "rediscover" wordtris. There's no creativity there.
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Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, E.T. could be a fun component of a game. Everyone controls bulldozers and tries to shove the most cartridges into a landfill that they can.
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, this can create a bunch of derivative games
So how is this any different that what we have now? How many "me too" games have you played that add nothing to their respective genres? Sure, these usually end up in the bargain bin within short order, but the industry is already derivative at times, so automating that part of the process is just a way to make that part of it cheaper.
Granted, I don't know if that will drive down the price of 2nd-tier games or cause more companies to make derivative drivel (*I'd* take a month's worth of profit at current prices for a game that I made simply by pressing the "make new game" button.).....but will it really change much? Unless a game is an A-tier game, they are quickly passed over based on reviews and word of mouth. The games with staying power offer something new and different which clearly won't be of the "push here for new game" type.
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's been "let me have it all with some simple work at the beginning, and a smoothly increasing amount of work appropriate to my increasing skills as time goes on".
Although this totally fails to explain Nethack, which is easy to learn but has more of a difficulty cliff than a difficulty ramp...
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It depends on how well you can make metrics to measure whether or not a game is fun, and how much freedom you give the computer to change things. A computer might have an easier time developing truly original games than a person, since the computer won't have any preconceptions about what games are "supposed" to be like.
And even if it was always derivative, I for one think it would be pretty cool if we could make games that dynamically generated original levels/maps/whatever that were truly interesting, rat
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever thought that sometimes a troll is right?
Better yet, did you even read the FA?
The formula for how they grade a game is defective. For example - "A game that can be won by random moves receives a -1".
One of the first games you ever played, tic-tac-toe can be won a decent amount of the time with random moves. Ditto rogue.
The article sucked, as does the idea of creating games by combining features of other games. We already have way too much of that everywhere - hollywood, tv, music, etc.
This is what happens when you don't have any creativity - you come up with yet another way to leach off others creativity.
The world doesn't need "Yet Another PacMan Clone." It also doesn't need someone who thinks that they can whore this out to game publishers as a way to save money producing more shovelware. We already see too much of that crap out there. If there is any trolling going on, it's the writers of the article who are doing it.
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One of the first games you ever played, tic-tac-toe can be won a decent amount of the time with random moves. Ditto rogue.
Dude, I can't even win rogue with deliberate moves. I think you'd have a higher chance in chess.....
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That would be like disagreeing with something because a republican president did it, while agreeing with the same action later on because a democratic president did it.
Fo
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if the government bailout (or budget for that matter) was auto generated it would be better than the current scenario.
Re:So Yankish... (Score:5, Insightful)
This system (like all computer-based systems) is simply a tool. No, it can't be truly creative. So what? Maybe I've got a great idea for a game, but I'm terrible at balancing the difficulty level. This tool (or one like it) could help me balance my game and increase it's playability.
This tool doesn't mean the end of creativity, it means that a previously arduous task can now be partially automated. Speaking as a technologist - that's a good thing.
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Creating something original is WORK.
I take it you don't understand what WORK is? The brilliance of a scheme like this is that the game players are the ones doing the WORK of game design. To be honest, I think that is how it should be.
A little less on the politics please (Score:2)
Okay you threw politics in the beginning and made a good point. Then you severely detracted from your argument by throwing in the stimulus package and your opinion that it will suck and that it's not imaginative.
I'm not going to argue that point with you, because this is off topic, but in terms of making your point, in the future, try not to apply so much politics to a post that has nothing to do with it, and don't end a perfectly good post about creativity with a political opinion.
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I for one support game makers if I like their product. Because of this I've supported several non-US based game companies like Introversion (Darwinia, Defcon, Uplink), Egosoft (X-series), Relic (aka THQ), CDV (various, mostly historical, RTSes)..
There's a ton of good non-US game companies.. i guess if you focus strickly on Consoles, like alot of people, then it's EA or {JapaneseGameCompanyHere}.
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yankish?
The researcher is from Switzerland.
Can we? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can We Create Fun Games Automatically?
Sure we can, depending on your definition of the words 'Fun', 'Game' and 'Automatically'.
:P
Different "fun" for people (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point. Different levels of "fun" and satisfaction.
Someone wrote about putting Age of Empires 2 on showroom PCs, and all the female customers went ga-ga over this game. They would then build mini cities and so on ... all without fighting. He said they wouldn't give a second look at AoE 3, or The Sims 2 ... they just wanted to play AoE 2.
Someone wrote about his entire family playing mostly older games [slashdot.org] (including all Mario games), and mostly avoiding newer, copy-protected games.
It amazes me reading these posts.
Re:Different "fun" for people (Score:4, Interesting)
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Umm, Redhat?
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Yeah, like we can generate academic papers automatically, without human intervention. It is called SCIgen. It is readable and understandable, depend on your definition of "Readable" and "Understandable".
Re:Can we? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Raph Koster [wikipedia.org] defines "fun" and "automatically" as the same thing, since in Star Wars Galaxies he designed in support for AFK macroing your way right up to the end "game" [allakhazam.com].
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'Game' and 'Automatically' are concepts and have solid definitions. 'Fun' is an emotion, you feel it rather than analyse it.
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Seems credible to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped playing new boardgames as all these become obvious after a few games, and if you tend to like one, old games already implement them perfectly. You basically have 3 (arguably 4) components in any board game : randomness (go play dices if you like it), tactical planning (go play chess), bluffing (go play poker) and, arguably, negotiation that can be seen as a merge between tactics and planning but that often use a whole different range of social skills.
Video games have also some recurring ingredients. I played less of them so I fail to see them more clearly, but some of them are obvious :
- a sentiment of progression. Whether artificial (through leveling in RPG games) or real (from FPS where you get better at shooting, rocket jumping, etc...)
- hidden content of the game, that the player has to find or guess. It is usually some content voluntarily put there by the game developer (quests, levels, maps) some hidden game logic that one must understand (AIs behavior, puzzles, research trees). In the most interesting games (in my humble opinion) there is also content that is almost emergent. The creator only loosely coded some rules and it is the player's actions that create his own problems to solve. It often happens in strategic or development games, where you discover that a design you chose had some vulnerabilities and that by correcting this, you create a whole bunch of new problems.
That one last part is the most difficult to reproduce automatically, in my opinion. But a lot of successful games don't have any such emergent content, so I guess that automated games generation can prove quite fruitful !
I think the research oversimplifies (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if you define "fun" as "a smooth learning curve", then you can make fun games automatically.
But not all of the fun is in the learning. Some fun is in tweaking humor. Some fun is in triggering a person's likes and dislikes (Nethack, ponies). Some fun is created by changing the venue (is it a space game? a historical shoot-em-up? A politics game?
Yes, there are underlying patterns to a lot of games. But simply limiting our definition of "fun" to "learning" and "follows the pattern" reminds me of the automatic novel generations in Orwell's 1984.
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
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I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
Why I disagree on the fact that the automatically generatable parts of fun are not enough to make a human-enjoyable game, I don't really have more counter arguments than there are arguments. That would make for an enjoyable Turing test. My only counter-argument is that I know of quite a few games which do not depend on depth to be fun.
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Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
But the things you've outlined, the setting of a game, the feel of a game, and the idea of a game are intentionally not touched by the research. In the games created by the research, very generic names are given to the different objects comprising the game, so that these variables of fun (the setting and the ideas behind the game mechanics) are left out of the equation. With those variables eliminated from the research, the focus is only on the difficulty of the game and the height of the learning curve. Th
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The points you mention though seem to fall under the categories of art, music and story.
The underlying game can exist without these qualities, and it would still operate the same mechanically. Of course, it will be worse for it, but the point is that creating good art/graphics or sounds/music is a completely different topic.
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The pattern I've noticed is take a successful game and give it better graphics. The games I play from the 80s on my MAME are the same I play with my kids on the Wii, they just have marginally better graphics and a greatly improved controller.
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Emergence is one of the most interesting phenomenon in computer science, in my opinion. It happens when simple rules create a behavior that is an order of magnitude more complex than the rules. In gaming, it happens when a ruleset offers simple problems that have complex solution. It may be possible to detect such occurrences, but you would need an AI able to solve the problems and measure the solution complexity. It is no
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Yes, I'm the one that did the experiments and wrote the paper.
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You basically have 3 [...] components in any board game : randomness [...], tactical planning [...], bluffing
One of your stated examples, chess, is lacking the randomness component, making your statement untrue. Although I suppose by taking the Uncertainty Principle into account it could be argued that there are random moves, they are just infinitely unlikely to occur... Though if I were on the other side, I would demand the piece be moved back, unless it was a valid random move.
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Creating stories (Score:2)
Wasn't there a short story about a computer that created and told stories?
Maybe by Lem?
Not a happy ending. (Ha! My awful memory won't protect you from spoilers!)
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That was Asimov's "Someday" i believe
Not the one I was talking about.
The one I'm trying to remember is about a computer that tells stories so good that they have to send it to space away from humanity (for some reason). Then, when they want to shut it down they can't, because every time an astronaut goes near, he starts receiving the stories and they are so good that he can't bear to destroy the author/computer.
Or something like that.
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Yes, that was Stanislaw Lem; one of his Trurl and Klaupacius stories from The Cyberiad. "The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard"
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Indeed. That was the one.
More to the point (Score:5, Funny)
Can we get research grant funding automatically ?
I believe the answer is yes.
1. Choose a 25 year old topic (for example, a Pacmangame), reinvent it using lots of buzzwords such as swarm, hive, collective, competitive, but secretly just program a system using some generic rules, and a gradient descent algorithm that will force those generic rules to conform to the behaviour we wanted in the first place. Then publish a PDF (why oh why by the way is PDF proprietary format ANY better than Microsoft's proprietary format ?), and spam it across tech news sites.
2. Make some wild claim that this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius (or similar).
3. ???
4. Profit !
PDF isn't a proprietary format (Score:5, Informative)
PDF has been opened. Admittedly the standards body which supports it is ISO, but I don't think anyone bribed them to approve it.
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I find it's hard to believe it's truly open when Microsoft were sued for trying to implement it.
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Citation?
(Without knowing anything, my immediate gut feeling would be that they may have gotten sued over intentionally implementing it in a wrong, incompatible fashion, kinda like how they tried with Java in the 90s. THAT would be understandable.)
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Re:More to the point (Score:4, Informative)
PDF is documented and can be read and written by open tools. Also it prints the same way every time.
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So presumably those patents on the splash screen are now null and void ? Including the one for the implementation of the LZW algorithm, that they don't even own ?
I fail to see how anything "open" can also be patented ... I mean what would be the point ?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I have written a tool which modifi
Re:More to the point (Score:5, Insightful)
why oh why by the way is PDF proprietary format ANY better than Microsoft's proprietary format ?
Probably because it addresses a need which hasn't been terribly well addressed by anyone else - providing a platform-independent mechanism to ship around information which you can more-or-less guarantee will look the same to everyone who opens the file, where the file will be hard to edit but easy to create, where the file will look much the same on screen as it will printed out (notwithstanding the limitations of the printer or indeed its driver).
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Choose a 25 year old topic (for example, a Pacmangame), reinvent it using lots of buzzwords such as swarm, hive, collective, competitive, but secretly just program a system using some generic rules, and a gradient descent algorithm that will force those generic rules to conform to the behaviour we wanted in the first place.
Yes! Thank you! I was going to say that using an EA just means that you're setting up a function space over all possible games of a certain type. In essence, you've already defined the parameters of "possible games" -- the EA is just stumbling through that parameter space -- hardly "creativity". And that goes for a bunch of other approaches "biologically-inspired" search algorithms that all essentially boil down to random search + heuristics.
OT: PDF format (Score:2)
Because it's not proprietary? [adobe.com]
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Umm... Mac OS X? Reads PDF quite well, with no external software installed whatsoever.
Windows? Bah!
Let me google that for you (Score:2)
Let me google that for you [letmegoogl...foryou.com]
Good luck using Google without Internet access (Score:2)
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Context: an article about automatically tuning video game difficulty, formatted for printing, and the difficulty in obtaining software to read a document formatted for printing on Windows.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
move out of the sticks, son
If everyone did that, who would make what you eat?
automawhat? (Score:2, Funny)
ugh.
Perhaps this has a future in game design? (Score:2)
Uhmm, no ? We need versatility in the games we play, and a complexity that such algorithms can't introduce automatically. Sure, such methods could help in creating some (!) game rules, anything more is beyond speculation.
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Erorr (Score:2)
Just because a fun game has X learning curve doesn't mean games with X learning curve are fun. The learning curve maintains attention, necessary for the game to be fun. The same learning curve in another situation may maintain attention to something droll. And something fun may have no learning curve at all. I suggest you're not looking at fun, you're looking at ability to maintain engagement. I also suggest fun does not have a single definition, or else everyone would play the same game.
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Dear all-knowing AC: You should respond with an informed rebuke to GP's post, rather than responding with scorn with a poor one-sentence mention of a book only very few have read.
In response to GP, quantifying "fun" (which is required for any automated learning algorithm) indeed isn't easy, but evolving game rules using an expected learning curve isn't a bad idea. Games with a too steep or too shallow learn
Already been done. (Score:2)
The nice thing about this article is that Raph is out spending his time on worthless stuff instead of sending his time creating a high profile game. He is really good at writing papers on how stuff should work but he cannot implement his own ideas.
Work on Hollywood movies? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seeing movies produced by following the "formula", do you want automated games? Do you even want a "formula" for "fun" game design?
Maybe its possible, but this starts to sound like automated art.
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Seeing movies produced by following the "formula", do you want automated games?
Only if a sequel is involved.
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Seeing movies produced by following the "formula", do you want automated games? Do you even want a "formula" for "fun" game design?
Isn't this what EA already does? Oh wait, I'm confusing "fun" with "profitable."
A profitable game is even more likely to generate a sequel than a profitable movie. And sequels are just a reimplementation of the formula provided by the original. To say nothing of all the copycat games that come out once a new game style becomes popular, i.e. profitable.
So the formulas already exist. It's just a matter of automating the production.
Not a chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
If programming and design could be done automatically, we wouldn't still have programmers. We can't even manage to automate creating simple apps. How could we possibly automate creating entire new games, which means new art, new rules, new everything.
On top of that, everyone finds something different in a game to be 'fun'. Some love challenge, some love adventure, some love collecting things... Attempts to make games that have everything anyone could love are usually pathetic flops.
I'll never forget (Score:5, Funny)
Make Game
Racing Game
2 tracks
In a programming IDE did not yield anything.
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Off the top of my head (Score:2, Insightful)
fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve.
Best example for this is Chess. Easy to learn but takes many years to master.
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I think Go is an even better example, the rules are extremely simple but the emergent gameplay is too complex to be brute forced(unlike chess).
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fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve.
Best example for this is Chess. Easy to learn but takes many years to master.
Maybe not such a great example, 'cause I find, e.g. Gears of War and Guitar Hero to be more fun than chess.
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Simplicity of form (Score:4, Insightful)
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I loved Columns for the Atropos sound-track. You could play for ages listening to that.
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In a sense, games such as the ones that you're talking about are partially generated automatically.
Taking Tetris as the textbook example, each game is different because the computer randomly selects pieces from a pre-designed list and throws it at the player. It's a very simple mechanism that allows the game to "automatically" generate new levels, but it works because the gameplay is so simple. The interesting question is whether or not increasing hardware resources and programming abilities will allow more
in other words (Score:2)
"Easy to learn, hard to master."
This falls under that umbrella. You're basically rewording this mantra in a more complex form.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, just don't let EA Marketing get their hands on this.
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Raph Koster? eech (Score:2)
Hopefully Raph had fun leaning from all the failings of Star Wars Galaxies. Me, not so much fun playing those failings.
Entertainment's metrics (Score:2)
Not very new, since Sudoku became popular when Wayne Gould wrote a program to generate puzzles, graded by difficulty.
I guess most of the paper puzzles can be generated this way (like crosswords...).
The difficulty largely lies into the entertainment's metrics.
The authors seem to have used humans to test their games, so I doubt that creating a game from scratch could be done entirely automatically.
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In fact, one of our main inventions is the idea of using a learning algorithm to grade the game, based on the idea that learning equals or creates fun. There are many other "static" functions for measuring fun proposed already, measuring things such as balance or challenge, but we are the first to use learnability as a predictor of fun.
Just ask EA (Score:2)
koster = time sink / grind (Score:2)
having played swg, one of koster's grand designs, i would never touch another game he was affiliated with. his concept of fun is grindage / time sink / drag it out as long as possible. the only person i dislike more than him are the ea ppl that killed mco.
koster is a broken tool
game programming would be like photography (Score:4, Interesting)
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i have been along for a shoot with truly amazing photographers that use film. one in particular that i knew had 22 keepers on a roll of 24. about 18 of those ended up in a show. an anecdote and a limit
No system can replace bums in seats (Score:2, Insightful)
"Can We Create Fun Games Automatically?"
Sure if you want a boring game. So lets see what are the common aspects that help a game along and can an AI game writing system create the environment that usually aids in creating a good game?
Here is what is required based on the one truth mentioned in the story regarding 'easy to play hard to master' I will use online FPS games as the example because that is mostly where my head is at. But my comments also apply to most other games and for single player with a litt
Defining trickiness (Score:3, Interesting)
Fun for me in games usually means there's always something to do or press. The old 2D games were more like this, but a large reason why I hate modern 3D games, is that there's often lots of sprawling around without really doing much (partially related to the 3D world, but it can be solved with difficulty).
I like the idea of how the article mentions that the algorithm biases towards games which can't just be won randomly. The board game is Go is the ultimate example of this I guess, where there are many *levels* of mastery.
But one has to be careful with this approach. If in a 3D game there's a small opening in (say) a castle wall, and miles around of plain grass, it's pretty easy to solve for a human player, despite the huge searchscape and 'narrow' solution that a computer would find tricky (which would apparently potentially rate as a good 'puzzle').
At the very least, developing models for other human factors such as reaction time, subtlety of graphic elements, and the challenge of pressing certain key combinations, would also be needed before final game automation could be achieved.
if it was that easy (Score:2, Insightful)
90% of games that came out wouldn't suck
juenger1701
This was attempted in a Shmup (Score:3, Interesting)
Evolution SHMUP: http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/evolution-shmup [kloonigames.com]
This was an experimental game, where the theory was to see how long a player would remain in a given game - as people continued playing, the system adapted gradually in order to maximize the fun value (in this case, the amount of time spent on a single game.)
This experiment has a smaller search space than the article, but isn't generating any "successful" games. This may be caused by the environment(i.e. the evolution scope is too narrow and thus isn't generating a variety of enemies), but the same problem can easily apply to the article in question.
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It's also completely unrelated to the paper, which explicitly says that they pick a single maze to use for all the games to ensure that it is about evolving the game rather than the maze.
Rickrolling for democracy (Score:2)
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The big difference from doing something like this on
In my country (Sweden), the parliament approved of monitoring of all inter
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However, such a thing as finding sensible values for how much money you get for selling something or how much damage you can do by hitting someone is definitely something you can optimize. Automatic game design, using evolutionary algorithms, is _not_ the same as arbitrarily making rules, as we are actually testing the rules with another learning pro