August 6, 2009
Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy have organized a competition to create an agent (or AI) that plays the video game Super Mario Bros. – or, more accurately, Infinite Mario Bros. a tribute game featuring random level generation.
The advantage of using Infinite Mario Bros. is the random level generation – which can let the agent learn more generalized playing tactics rather than tactics that are tailored to a static set of levels as in Ms. Pac-Man or Pitfall.
I look forward to seeing the results of the competition, and hope to see source code published as well.
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AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, games, machine learning, Mario, Ms. Pac-Man, Nintendo, Pitfall, video games | 
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Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
June 29, 2009
From Rutgers university comes a learning algorithm that they have applied to playing the Atari 2600 game “Pitfall!”.
An example video is on YouTube.
One of the research papers is apparently here (although the site isn’t being very responsive at the moment).
I’ll get around to posting on machine learning for Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man at some point as well.
(Spotted on Kotaku and GameSetWatch.)
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, Atari 2600, games, machine learning, Pitfall, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
April 25, 2009
We’ve all seen the findings showing that Tetris has effects upon cerebral glucose metabolic rates (GMRs). Well, the game is back in the news with more brain research…
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No Comments » | brain science, games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, brain, brain science, games, PTSD, Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Videogames | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
April 21, 2009
I wasn’t previously aware of VideoGamePriceCharts.com, but I learned about them recently through Kotaku. The site tracks the prices of used video games. Of particular interest is their recent article tracking prices of series games when a new installment is released.
The article shows historical data for series games such as Resident Evil, Pokemon and Call of Duty that shows spikes in prices for used copies of the older series installments surrounding the release of the newer installments. This is not entirely surprising, but I’ve never seen real data laid out to support the idea. They also have a posting from last year that shows the release of GTA IV causing a spike in prices for the earlier GTA games.
This has a few interesting implications:
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No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: capitalism, datamining, economics, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
March 31, 2009
No, I’m not talking about handheld games. I’m talking about games that get ported to a variety of hardware platforms.
Code portability is a topic of interest to me, and some video games allow an opportunity to study code that is ported across multiple hardware platforms and multiple operating systems. And sometimes, it is just a pleasure to see a good game move to another platform.
There are actually several categories here, so I’ll take a quick moment to sketch out how I divide them.
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No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, Atari 2600, Dallas Gaming Mafia, Doom, emulation, first person shooter, FPS, id Software, portability, Quake, Tetris, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
March 28, 2009
A group of academic researchers have obtained the complete server logs for the Everquest 2 MMORPG. It’s four years of data for over 400,000 players – the resulting dataset is nearly 60TB. That’s right, terabytes. Combined with some demographic surveys there is interesting datamining potential here.
This is also interesting because apparently the standard tools don’t quite scale to the task of analyzing this data:
Regardless of format, many one-pass, exhaustive algorithms simply choke on a dataset this large, which is forcing his group to use some incremental analysis methods or to work with subsets of the data.
Some items in the results that I found interesting:
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No Comments » | datamining, games, video games | Tagged: Amazon.com, datamining, Everquest, MMORPG, Sony, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
March 25, 2009
I’ve been watching the multi-core video card space and looking at efforts to offload AI onto that hardware. In particular, I’m curious to see the shakeout of the various APIs. One candidate usage is, of course, video games.
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No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, pathfinding, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
March 25, 2009
id Software has released an iPhone port of Wolfenstein 3D. Released on the MS-DOS platform in 1992, the game has 16 years of history and has been ported to a variety of platforms in the years since.
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No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: CLIPS, Dallas Gaming Mafia, first person shooter, FPS, id Software, iPhone, open source, video game, Wolfenstein 3D | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
February 16, 2009
And what do we have here? It seems that Nvidia and AMD are already on top of the idea of offloading AI onto GPUs.
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6 Comments | AI, video games | Tagged: AI, AMD, Cuda, GPGPU, multicore, NVidia, parallelism, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
