wharare

1. What are Computer Games?

Commercial Games (Market sphere)

Home
Arcade

Commercial Games (Duration)

Military Games
Single Player-Multiplayer Games
Networked Games

Interactive Entertainment

Importance of the topic.

Computer games of worthy of study because game-like phenomena occur naturally in many computational settings.

     Computing optimal strategies in standard games and puzzles
              Motivated by the desire to automate models of thinking
     Optimization in decision problems under uncertainity
     Cryptographic problems that arise in multi-party protocols
              Motivated by the desire to model competitive nature of cryptographic protocols
              Modeling Interaction between two mistrustful agents and an eavesdropper agent
     Coordination of processes in distributed processing systems
              Competition for resources and cooperation for solving a problem.

     Randomness
     Secrecy
     Limited Resources
     Limited Information

Computer games can be approached from different directions.

     Point of view of a programmer - Interested in creating impressive arcade games with multimedia emphasis
     Point of a view of a theoretician - Interested in developing the best strategy
     Point of view of AI - Interested in making agents paly the games
          AI is going to be more important in games
          A great environment for developing human-level AI
          Academic AI has something to offer the game industry

Applications of AI to Games

Synthetic Characters
Sports games, FPS, RTS, …

     Dynamic Game Control
          Modify play calling based on experience (coaching)
          Directing characters for plot and story
          Providing play-by-play, camera control, …

Development of Games
Automatic testing

Cognitive Architectures

     ACT-R (John Anderson, Carnegie Mellon)
          Detailed models of behavior and learning
               10 milliseconds-10 seconds.
          Used by cognitive psychologists
          Issues on performance and scalabiltiy
     EPIC (David Kieras, University of Michigan)
          Detailed models of human-computer interaction (no learning)
               Emphasizes models of perception and action
               50 milliseconds-10 seconds
          Used by cognitive psychologist
     Soar (John Laird, University of Michigan)
          Models of human behavior and learning
               50 milliseconds-1 hour
               Emphasis more on complex behavior and learning
          Used by AI researchers and cognitive psychologist