Game Development and Artificial Intelligence

Date : 2 March 2006 (Thursday)

Venue : Engineering Auditorium

Speaker : Dr Alexander Nareyek, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) & Chief Technology Officer (CTO),

Digital Drama Studios, Czech Republic

TOPIC 1 : Game Development and Artificial Intelligence

TIME : 1.00 pm to 2.00 pm

Abstract

Computer games are certainly one of the most exciting application areas, where lots of impressive technologies blend together. I will provide a brief overview of the gaming area and game development in general, and then focus on how artificial intelligence is applied in computer games. This includes techniques like steering, pathfinding, scripting, finite state machines, etc. All techniques will be shown with entertaining game examples and demos. The talk will conclude with an outlook on the future of this exciting field.

The talk is meant for a general audience and should be easy to follow even for those with little technical knowledge.

TOPIC 2 : Goal-oriented Action Planning – Advancing towards Real-World Applications

TIME : 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm

Abstract

Action planning is one of the main application areas studied in artificial intelligence. A planning system has to find and schedule a set of actions in order to achieve a set of given goals. Examples are a robot that needs to think of a path of actions to fulfill its tasks, a computer-guided character in a computer game, an autonomously operating spaceship, or an internet tool that has to arrange some travel plans.

will give a basic introduction to action planning and demonstrate our agent system that is based on this technology. Related areas, such as constraint programming, local search, and reinforcement learning, will be discussed and their concrete application be shown in our system. Our system was specifically tailored to the requirements of domains like computer gaming, providing real-time computation and handling a dynamic and not completely known environment.

Biography

Alexander Nareyek received his diploma and Ph.D from the TU Berlin. He won the German Research Center for Information Technology’s Best Degree Thesis Award and was a winner of the BMWi’s Founders Competition Multimedia. He held a post-doctoral position at GMD-FIRST, and was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2003. After this he joined the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Ireland. His main research interests include the enhancement of planning and constraint programming techniques with real-world features like real time and dynamics. His primary application area is computer games. For the International Game Developers Association, he is responsible for matters regarding artificial intelligence, and serves as chairperson of the IGDA’s Artificial Intelligence Interface Standards Committee. In 2005, Alexander Nareyek was appointed CEO of Digital Drama Studios, which is a middleware company focusing on AI for computer games and interactive entertainment. More information is available at http://www.ai-center.com/home/alex/