The problem with the iPlayer

So the BBC is going ahead with making much of their content available online - through a system crippled by Microsoft's DRM. The reason they give is that "the right's holders - the people that make the programmes, from Ricky Gervais to the independent producers that account for up to a third of our programming - simply wouldn't have given us the rights to their programmes unless we could demonstrate very robust digital rights management."

Alright. But what about the programs that the BBC produce themselves? Shouldn't they by default be exempt from DRM? As for the independent producers, the BBC by merit of its size should be in such a bargaining position that they could force them to accept DRM-free distribution. But apparently the corporation hasn't got enough spine for that. Sad.

DRM is fundamentally at odds with the spirit of public service. Who is going to stand up against DRM if not the public service media corporations? And what's the point in public service at all if it bows to commercial media's ideas about DRM?

Where is Julian?

Is he nowhere to be seen? That is only because he is writing up his thesis. He's been hiding in Ekerö, Sweden for quite a while now, where everything is quiet, idyllic and there is nothing to disturb his thesis writing. See for yourselves how idyllic it is:



But now he's back in England! Rumours have it that he's trying to get the thesis ready for submission in two weeks time. Lots of work, then. Probably not much time for blog posting until that's done.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

So there you have it.

Grand and Molyneux on game AI

The Guardian has an article containing short interviews with Peter Molyneux and Steve Grand, two people who have managed to put out commercial games (in one case arguably commercially successful as well) containing "real" AI. Interesting read. They're both essentially pushing the idea that as games get even prettier, the stupidity of current game "AI" will shine through more and more, and so the need for "real" AI will increase, not increase.

I say maybe. While Molyneux's games are a great source of inspiration it's possible that it and its likes will always constitute a niche market, and your average FPS, RTS or movie tie-in adventure will never benefit from a neural network or evolutionary algorithm. But I do hope that I'm wrong here.

Whichever the case, we can still use commercial games for academic research just the same, in order to help us understand natural and computational intelligence. And I think we should. Much more than today.

Back from Hawaii, back to reality...

Finally, my first "normal" day since coming back. That is, I plan to spend most of my day in the lab... reviewing some papers for CEC, answering some mails, and starting to write my thesis.

Yes, that's right. The plan is to start writing my PhD thesis. Today. So maybe it's not that normal a day after all. Further, according to the plan, I will hand in my thesis in June and have a viva in September. It's not impossible, I believe.

The IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence was a good event from a scientific perspective, and an excellent one from a networking perspective. I spent plenty of time drinking cocktails with Games and ALife people, discussing research ideas and completely unrelated stuff.

After the conference we spent a few more days in Hawaii, and me and Hugo went on to do some touristing in San Francisco. Fantastic city, indeed.

CIG Car Racing Competition results

The winner of the CIG Car Racing Competition is Peter Burrow - congratulations, Pete! He used a modular controller based on two incrementally evolved neural networks, and the nearest competitor, Thomas Haferlach, also used a modular controller based on two neural networks, although CTRNNs rather than the more straightforward networks Pete used.

Aravind Gowrisankar and Matthew Simmerson submitted controllers based on NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) and I submitted a simple hard-coded controller, an simple evolved neural network, as well as (together with Hugo Marques) a controller based on an evolved neural network for controlling the car together with a copy of the whole simulation environment for predicting which car will reach the current way point first. None of these approaches scored as well as the modular controllers of Pete and Tom, but with some more work they might well do.

As for where that work would be submitted, we are planning to run another car racing competition for CEC 2007. That would give contestants several more months (until September) to work on their controllers. We haven't currently decided on the exact details of that competition, but plan to finalise it before the end of April. So if you have any ideas on in what direction to take the competition (changing the interfaces? dynamics model? task? etc) please speak up now!

In Hawaii

So now I'm in Hawaii, "preparing" for the IEEE Symposium Series which will start tomorrow. Preparing on the beach, that is.

There has been a lot of interest in the CIG Car Racing Competition after the recent media coverage. Unfortunately, the deadline is passed (the results will be presented on Thursday) but given the interest I will definitely look into some way of rerunning the competition, either by attaching it to another conference or making it into some form of permanent league.

Another "Ask Slashdot" of mine recently got on the frontpage - it's about the Most Impressive Game AI. Check it out. Unfortunately I don't know if I can contribute much to the discussion as there's no Internet on the beach. Or, at least, I'm not bringing a laptop to the beach.

Slashdot and New Scientist

Thread on Slashdot on the car racing research:

Slashdot thread

Contains some interesting discussion, and was soon picked up by New Scientist:

New Scientist article

Hmm... interesting that I am linking to a post that links back to this blog. Self-referential promotion.

Mini-Grand Challenge, sort of...

So now it's official: we (a team led by Simon) will build a demonstrator model car with onboard computer control, and organize the first model car competitions at WCCI 2008. The IDEA is that a smaller car faces the same problems of navigation, control, computer vision etc. as a full-size car does, but is enormously cheaper to build. So it's like a miniature version of the DARPA Grand Challenge, that anyone can participate in. Of course, this makes it possible to try some riskier approaches, that you would never dare try with a full-size car, such as various machine learning techniques. We hope we will see lots of innovative entrants to the competition.

Most impressive game AI?

I have the feeling that when developers make the effort to put really sophisticated AI into a game, gamers frequently just don't notice (see e.g. Forza). Conversely, games that are lauded for their fantastic AI are sometimes based on very simple algorithms (e.g. Halo 1). For someone who wants to apply AI to games, it is very interesting to know what AI is really appreciated. So, what is the most impressive game AI you have come across? Have you ever encountered a situation where it really felt like the computer-controlled opponents were really thinking, that there were "someone in there"?