A Panorama of Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games

Georgios Yannakakis and I are proud to present our new survey paper called "A Panorama of Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games", to be published in IEEE TCIAIG.

It is available from IEEE Xplore here; if you don't have access to Xplore, there's a free pdf available here.

This is a very ambitious paper, on which we have worked on and off for two years. The aim is nothing less than to survey which are the active areas of research and application of computational intelligence (CI) and artificial intelligence (AI) in games, and how these areas inform each other.

To this end, we identify 10 key areas of research and application, and more than 50 ways in which these areas interact. So if you ever wanted to know how NPC learning affects procedural content generation, where player modelling can be used in commercial games or how game-based AI competitions inform planning research, these are exactly the kind of questions we seek to answer here.

Furthermore, we try to identify which of these research areas inform technology development for which part of the player-game interaction loop, and which key AI and machine learning algorithms are used in those areas. Yes, it is rather complex, though we have attempted to make it more like a readable paper and less like a phone directory or circuit diagram.

While the article is not really meant as an introduction to research in game AI, it might be used as supplementary reading in courses on AI/CI and games. However, its main purpose is to help you, as a researcher or practioner in this field or some neighbouring field, structure and understand this rapidly evolving research field. As part of this mapping operation, we have also identified numerous underexplored or unexplored connections, so there are a number of suggestions for promising future research projects within the paper.

The article builds partly on the Dagstuhl seminar in 2012, where around 40 of the world's leading experts on CI and AI in games assembled to identify the key areas and problems of this research field. It also builds on our own experience of working in the field for around a decade, including running several workshops and conferences. However, despite our best attempts at being inclusive and adopting a panoramic perspective (meaning that we try to see everything), the article will of course be coloured by our own perspective. That's why we are so eager to hear your comments on the paper - we sincerely hope this paper can catalyse a discussion within the community on what exactly it is we are doing!

We will give a tutorial based on this paper at CIG 2014 - of course, we hope as many as possible of you can make it there.

Now go on and read the paper - we look forward to your feedback!