AI in Games
In this episode, Kyle Polich interviews the authors of the first textbook dedicated to artificial intelligence in games — Georgios Yannakakis at the University of Malta and Julian Togelius at New York University. There is an increasing use of video games to develop and test AI, and there’s also a long-standing use of AI methods in designing games. Both fields use very different methods, and Georgios and Julius’s text book, Artificial Intelligence and Games try to bridge this divide, as the two fields don’t always understand each other.
Julius and Georgios argue that while games pose interesting and complex problems for AI to solve, AI also helps improve games. Their book looks at three broad areas: playing games as a player or non-player, generating content, and modeling players. In the area of playing games, there are some that involve just players, such as chess and Go, and then there are games in which non-players are involved, such as in Zelda, Call of Duty.
Games also involve generating content involves creating game worlds such as levels, maps, textures or characters. Julius and Georgios argue that if you think of content generation as an AI problem, game designers can do so much more. Finally, when you look at games involving non-players, an area of research interest is modeling players, which involves learning how to predict how players will feel or what players will do.
Learn more about the book and the 2018 summar course being taught by the authors and industry veterans at http://school.gameaibook.org/
Georgios Yannakakis
Georgios Yannakakis is a professor and director at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta. He received his PhD in informatics from the University of Edinburgh and was previously an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Georgios's research interests lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational creativity, affective computing, advanced game technology, and human-computer interaction. He works on concepts such as user experience modeling and procedural content generation for designing personalized interactive systems. Georgios is also the co-author of the book "Artificial Intelligence and Games."
Julian Togelius
Julian Togelius is an associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Essex and was previously an associate professor at IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Julian's research interests are in the intersection between computational intelligence and games. He is interested in what AI can do for games, and what games can do for AI. His current work focuses on search-based procedural content generation, evolutionary reinforcement learning in digital games, and player modeling. Julian is also the co-author of the book "Artificial Intelligence and Games."
