Kurukshetra AI Game Dev Event

Sanjeev Chandran recently told me about this Game AI event, part of an international science festival in Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad (India). One of the competitions that forms part of the event concerns automatic content creation, and I was told it is inspired by my work. Cool!

Sanjeev chose the classic Lunar Lander game as the domain. In the automatic content creation competition, participants are expected to come up with ways of automatically designing the lunar surface as well as setting parameters such as gravity in order to make the game more fun for human players.



I think that with a game as simple as Lunar Lander, there is lots of scope for focusing the development effort on the AI/CI algorithms rather than petty technical questions. The rules for the competition are quite loose, as is the objective and scoring. This could be a problem, but could also mean that we see some really creative submissions.

In any case, it will be very interesting to see what comes out of this!

CIG 2009 CFP

New year, new CIG. Below is the first CFP for the conference to go to if you're interested in computational intelligence and games. This time, I'm on the organizing committee as well.

*** IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG-2009) ***
Milano, Italy - September 7-10, 2008
http://www.ieee-cig.org

Games are an ideal domain to study computational intelligence methods.
They provide cheap, competitive, dynamic, reproducible environments
suitable for testing new search algorithms, pattern based evaluation
methods or learning concepts. At the same time they are interesting to
observe, fun to play, and very attractive to students. This symposium,
sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society aims to bring
together leading researchers and practitioners from both academia and
industry to discuss recent advances and explore future directions in
this field.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Learning in games
* Coevolution in games
* Neural-based approaches for games
* Fuzzy-based approaches for games
* Console and video games
* Character Development and Narrative
* Opponent modeling in games
* CI/AI-based game design
* Multi-agent and multi-strategy learning
* Comparative studies
* Applications of game theory
* Board and card games
* Economic or mathematical games
* Imperfect information and non-deterministic games
* Evasion (predator/prey) games
* Realistic games for simulation or training purposes
* Player satisfaction in games
* Games for mobile or digital platforms
* Games involving control of physical objects
* Games involving physical simulation

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
General Chair: Pier Luca Lanzi
Program Chair: Sung-Bae Cho
Proceedings Chair: Luigi Barone
Publicity Chair: Julian Togelius
Competition Chair: Simon Lucas
Sponsorship Chair: Georgios N. Yannakakis
Local Chairs: Nicola Gatti and Daniele Loiacono

IMPORTANT DATES (tentative schedule)
Tutorial proposals: 15 April 2009
Paper submission: 15 May 2009
Decision Notification: 15 June 2009
Camera-ready: 15/30 July 2009
Symposium: 7-11 September 2009

CONFERENCE VENUE
The symposium will be held at the Politecnico di Milano, the largest
technical university in Italy, ten minutes from downtown Milan, the
shopping area, and its famous galleries and museums.

For more information please visit:
http://www.ieee-cig.org