Creating and evaluating games manually is an arduous and laborious task. Procedural content generation can aid by creating game artifacts, but usually not an entire game. Evolutionary game design, which combines evolutionary algorithms with automated playtesting, has been used to create novel board games with simple equipment; however, the original approach does not include complex tabletop games with dice, cards, and maps. This work proposes an extension of the approach for tabletop games, evaluating the process by generating variants of Risk, a military strategy game where players must conquer map territories to win. We achieved this using a genetic algorithm to evolve the chosen parameters, as well as a rules-based agent to test the games and a variety of quality criteria to evaluate the new variations generated. Our results show the creation of new variations of the original game with smaller maps, resulting in shorter matches. Also, the variants produce more balanced matches, maintaining the usual drama. We also identified limitations in the process, where, in many cases, where the objective function was correctly pursued, but the generated games were nearly trivial. This work paves the way towards promising research regarding the use of evolutionary game design beyond classic board games.
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）
This document describes the design and implementation of the Tabletop Games framework (TAG), a Java-based benchmark for developing modern board games for AI research. TAG provides a common skeleton for implementing tabletop games based on a common API for AI agents, a set of components and classes to easily add new games and an import module for defining data in JSON format. At present, this platform includes the implementation of seven different tabletop games that can also be used as an example for further developments. Additionally, TAG also incorporates logging functionality that allows th…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Södertörn University（瑟德通大学）；University of Malta（马耳他大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design can usefully be viewed as procedural content generator design. We present several case studies linking key concepts from PCG research -- including possibility spaces, expressive range analysis, and generative pipelines -- to key concepts in TTRPG design. We then discuss the implications of these relationships and suggest directions for future work uniting research in TTRPGs and PCG.
Tabu Search (TS) metaheuristic improves simple local search algorithms (e.g. steepest ascend hill-climbing) by enabling the algorithm to escape local optima points. It has shown to be useful for addressing several combinatorial optimization problems. This paper investigates the performance of TS and considers the effects of the size of the Tabu list and the size of the neighbourhood for a procedural content generation, specifically the generation of maps for a popular tabletop game called Terra Mystica. The results validate the feasibility of the proposed method and how it can be used to gener…
Using Game Engines and Machine Learning to Create Synthetic Satellite Imagery for a Tabletop Verification Exercise
Berliner Hochschule für Technik（柏林技术应用科学大学）；Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学科学与全球安全项目）；Einstein Center Digital Future, Berlin（柏林爱因斯坦数字未来中心）
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
This paper introduces a simple and fast variant of Planet Wars as a test-bed for statistical planning based Game AI agents, and for noisy hyper-parameter optimisation. Planet Wars is a real-time strategy game with simple rules but complex game-play. The variant introduced in this paper is designed for speed to enable efficient experimentation, and also for a fixed action space to enable practical inter-operability with General Video Game AI agents. If we treat the game as a win-loss game (which is standard), then this leads to challenging noisy optimisation problems both in tuning agents to pl…
This paper describes a new evolutionary algorithm that is especially well suited to AI-Assisted Game Design. The approach adopted in this paper is to use observations of AI agents playing the game to estimate the game's quality. Some of best agents for this purpose are General Video Game AI agents, since they can be deployed directly on a new game without game-specific tuning; these agents tend to be based on stochastic algorithms which give robust but noisy results and tend to be expensive to run. This motivates the main contribution of the paper: the development of the novel N-Tuple Bandit E…
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology（加齐大学工程科学与技术学院）；Al Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMSIU)（伊玛目穆罕默德·伊本·沙特伊斯兰大学）；National University of Computer and Emerging Science（国立计算机与新兴科学大学）
Games have always been a popular test bed for artificial intelligence techniques. Game developers are always in constant search for techniques that can automatically create computer games minimizing the developer's task. In this work we present an evolutionary strategy based solution towards the automatic generation of two player board games. To guide the evolutionary process towards games, which are entertaining, we propose a set of metrics. These metrics are based upon different theories of entertainment in computer games. This work also compares the entertainment value of the evolved games …
In this report, we inspect the application of an evolutionary approach to the game of Rack'O, which is a card game revolving around the notion of decision making. We first apply the evolutionary technique for obtaining a set of rules over many generations and then compare them with a script written by a human player. A high-level domain-specific language is used that deter-mines which the sets of rules are synthesized. We report the results by providing a comprehensive analysis of the set of rules and their implications.
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Microsoft Research Cambridge（微软剑桥研究院）
Game-playing Evolutionary Algorithms, specifically Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms, have recently managed to beat the state of the art in win rate across many video games. However, the best results in a game are highly dependent on the specific configuration of modifications and hybrids introduced over several papers, each adding additional parameters to the core algorithm. Further, the best previously published parameters have been found from only a few human-picked combinations, as the possibility space has grown beyond exhaustive search. This paper presents the state of the art in R…
The George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Evolutionary game theory has been a successful tool to combine classical game theory with learning-dynamical descriptions in multiagent systems. Provided some symmetric structures of interacting players, many studies have been focused on using a simplified heuristic payoff table as input to analyse the dynamics of interactions. Nevertheless, even for the state-of-the-art method, there are two limits. First, there is inaccuracy when analysing the simplified payoff table. Second, no existing work is able to deal with 2-population multiplayer asymmetric games. In this paper, we fill the gap betwe…
This paper describes the N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm (NTBEA), an optimisation algorithm developed for noisy and expensive discrete (combinatorial) optimisation problems. The algorithm is applied to two game-based hyper-parameter optimisation problems. The N-Tuple system directly models the statistics, approximating the fitness and number of evaluations of each modelled combination of parameters. The model is simple, efficient and informative. Results show that the NTBEA significantly outperforms grid search and an estimation of distribution algorithm.
Artificial Intelligence, when amalgamated with games makes the ideal structure for research and advancing the field. Multi-agent games have multiple controls for each agent which generates huge amounts of data while increasing search complexity. Thus, we need advanced search methods to find a solution and create an artificially intelligent agent. In this paper, we propose our novel Evolutionary Monte Carlo Tree Search (FEMCTS) agent which borrows ideas from Evolutionary Algorthims (EA) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to play the game of Pommerman. It outperforms Rolling Horizon Evolutionary…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；NetEase Games AI Lab（网易游戏人工智能实验室）
Despite the emerging progress of integrating evolutionary computation into reinforcement learning, the absence of a high-performance platform endowing composability and massive parallelism causes non-trivial difficulties for research and applications related to asynchronous commercial games. Here we introduce Lamarckian - an open-source platform featuring support for evolutionary reinforcement learning scalable to distributed computing resources. To improve the training speed and data efficiency, Lamarckian adopts optimized communication methods and an asynchronous evolutionary reinforcement l…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of reinforcement learning under multi-agent settings has long remained an open problem. While previous works primarily focus on 2-player games, we consider population games, which model the strategic interactions of a large population comprising small and anonymous agents. This paper presents a formal relation between stochastic processes and the dynamics of independent learning agents who reason based on the reward signals. Using a master equation approach, we provide a novel unified framework for characterising population dynamics via a single partial …
