The 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games ...

He and his students developed the software LIBSVM, which is one of the most widely used SVM packages. Numerous companies and research institutes have applied this software for their research and development works. Tens of thousands of papers have used LIBSVM for analysis and experiments. Recently, his group studied techniques for large-scale linear classification. They developed the software LIBLINEAR for efficiently training millions or even larger document data sets. This package has now been widely used in many Internet companies. Chih-Jen Lin has served as an action editor or an associate editor for several top quality journals including IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. He has received many awards for his research work. Further, he and his collaborators have won some prestigious data mining and machine learning competitions. His most recent award is the ACM KDD 2010 best paper award. Dharmendra S. Modha IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, USA for contributions to cognitive computing and caching algorithms

Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is the Manager of the Cognitive Computing Depar tment at IBM Research—Almaden, USA. He received B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay, in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UCSD, in 1995. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator for DARPA SyNAPSE team of IBM Research—Almaden, IBM Research—Watson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University, and University of California at Merced. Most recently, his group performed cortical simulations at scale of cat cerebral cortex (1 billion neurons, 10 trillion synapses) only 100x slower than realtime on a 147,456 processor BlueGene/P supercomputer. This work received 2009 ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize. In 2010, his group compiled, visualized, and analyzed the largest long-distance network currently in existence of the Macaque monkey brain leading to a publication in PNAS. His research has had significant practical impact on IBM’s businesses; these include Adaptive Replacement Cache

The 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games Report

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lthough Copenhagen in the second half of August last year was cold, rainy and g rey it provided an excellent setting for an intense conference with a packed technical program. All the attendees were supposed to stay indoors to Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2011.940612 Date of publication: 13 April 2011

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absorb the contents of the conference. And they did. The 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2010), the sixth installment in the CIG series, was held at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), Denmark, from the 18th to the 21st of August. The General Chairs of the Conference were us (Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian

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for read-caching, Wise Ordering of Writes for write-caching, modulation codes for disk drives, and data/document clustering algorithms. At IBM, he has won the Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper award (twice), an Outstanding Innovation Award, an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, and Communication Systems Best Paper Award. He holds 29 US patents, and is currently an IBM Master Inventor. In 2010, he became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. In 2006, he chaired IBM’s Almaden Institute on Cognitive Computing; in 2007, he cochaired Cognitive Computing at University of California—Berkeley; in 2007, he spoke at the Decade of the Mind Symposium at the George Mason University; in 2008, he spoke at the Singularity Summit; and, in 2009, he was invited by IEEE for Media Roundtable to celebrate IEEE’s 125th Anniversary. His work has been profiled in a many hundreds of high-visibility media outlets including IEEE Spectrum, New York Times, Bloomberg, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Discover, PC Magazine, and BBC News. He has authored over 50 publications in international journals and conferences. He is a member of AAAS, ACM, and SfN.

Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius, IT University of Copenhagen, DENMARK

Togelius), and we had precious help from Program Chairs Michael Mateas, Risto Miikkulainen and R. Michael Young, Proceedings Chair Pier Luca Lanzi, Competitions Chair Simon M. Lucas and Industrial Liaison Chair Alex Champandard, as well as our local organizers Anders Drachen, Paolo Burelli, Tobias Mahlmann, Hector P. Martinez and Noor Shaker.

Over the past six years, CIG has confirmed its status as the leading event bringing together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss recent advances and to explore future directions in computational intelligence and games. This year, we were honoured to host the first IEEE CIG conference in the series. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society recently approved the change in name, and status, of CIG from a Symposium to a Conference. That change came with increased responsibility and expectations for a larger and better CIG. These expectations were fulfilled. CIG 2010 received 124 submissions from authors in 31 countries all over the world, setting up a new record of submissions for IEEE CIG, surpassing the previous highest submission number by almost 50% (high score!). We also strived to increase the already high quality threshold for the Conference by lowering the acceptance rate. Thus, all papers were peer-reviewed by at least three domain experts and 61 (acceptance rate: 49.1%) of them were accepted for presentation and publication in the proceedings (43 regular papers, five competition papers and 13 posters). In total, just over 100 delegates attended the conference, plus an unspecified number of local students. Additionally, up to 40 people at any time watched the talks via live video streaming over the Internet; video recordings of most talks can be obtained by following links from the Web site (game.itu.dk/cig2010), as can the papers. In addition to the technical papers, the conference included a number of keynotes, tutorials and competitions, as well as a panel. The technical program was so packed that the afternoon sessions had to be split in two parallel tracks. Like previous years, a large part of the technical program was taken up by various approaches to learning to play games—all sorts of games, from abstract mathematical games to board games for first-person shooters and arcade games. Key techniques were evolutionary computation, neural networks, fuzzy logic

FIGURE 1 Delegates gathering outside the main auditorium just before Bruce Damer’s kick-off keynote talk.

and reinforcement learning through approximate dynamic programming. Within this “core” research area, progress is happening fast, and most papers here describe considerably more mature research than those presented at the first CIG in 2005. At the same time, we have strived to expand the focus of the Conference and to bring in neighboring and emergent fields related to the main topics. Thus, we have seen papers on game application topics such as interactive narrative, procedural content generation, game mining, adaptive team-mates and cognitive and emotional modelling, and on techniques such as reactive planning, Monte Carlo tree search and Bayesian networks. In other words, the conference program has been gaining both depth and breadth over the years. I. Keynotes

Our program included five keynote talks from well respected scholars and game developers who were invited to bring fresh perspectives on the field of Computational Intelligence and Games. Our first keynote speaker was Bruce Damer from the Contact Consortium, biota. org, and DigitalSpace, USA. Building on experiences from his long and very varied career within artificial life, simulation and multiplayer game world development, Bruce talked about how artificial life and game technology can inform each other. One of his visions is that

virtual worlds can become home to the world’s first real artificial ecosystems. The second day of the conference started with Steve Rabin from the DigiPen Institute of Technology and Nintendo of America, USA, giving a history of game AI and his projections for the future of the field. A key theme was the close interplay of game AI and game design; certain AI inventions only make sense when paired with particular game designs, and vice versa. Johan Pfannenstill from Ubisoft Massive, Sweden, provided an industry perspective in his keynote, discussing the development and architecture of the AI for the real-time strategy (RTS) game World in Conflict. The RTS genre is one of the few computer game genres where it is a significant challenge to construct an AI which wins against experienced human players without cheating. Johan pointed out the particular challenges associated with this genre, and problems where academic researchers could make contributions. A very different perspective was provided by Espen Aarseth from the Center for Computer Games Research at ITU Copenhagen, Denmark, on the third day of the conference. Espen is the founder of the field of game studies, a humanities field that studies computer games in a manner similar to how literature and media studies study their respective fields: close readings and theorizing. In his talk, Espen outlined aesthetics for

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bottom-up narrative in games, where the narrative emerges from interaction between primitive components and agents rather than being scripted by an author in a top-down fashion as is common in story-driven games today. Given the emphasis on bottom-up processes and emergence in computational intelligence research, this idea resonated well with many participants. Our final keynote was delivered by Marc Cavazza from the University of Teesside, UK. Marc gave an overview of the field of AI-driven interactive storytelling and how it can be integrated with games, and gave examples from research conducted in his own prominent lab. Various reasons for why interactive storytelling has so far failed to make serious inroads in commercial game development were discussed, suggesting some promising avenues for AI researchers interested in contributing to the future of games.

cian working within evolutionary computation, and addressed the problem of analyzing evolved strategies from a mathematical but practical perspective. He presented a useful technique for fingerprinting strategies through playing them against a collection of other strategies, in a talk which positively brimmed with ideas for how mathematics can help us understand evolution and games. Christian Thurau from Fraunhofer IAIS in Germany then gave a tutorial on a fascinating emerging application area: game mining, or the data mining of massive datasets generated by games. The amount of game data available for analysis is staggering since major games now sell millions of copies and many of those

II. Tutorials

The first day of the conference featured four tutorials on a range of topics we deemed to be of interest for large parts of the CIG community. The day started with Cyril Brom from Charles University in Prague, FIGURE 2 During the poster session of 2010 IEEE CIG. Czech Republic, giving an introduction to basic AI techniques for games continuously log detailed inforgames as well as the Pogamut framemation about what players do in the work for controlling characters in the game. We are only just beginning to popular FPS game Unreal Tournament understand what can be gleaned from 2004. While the topic of the tutorial this data; Christian gave examples of could be described as conventional, identifying player types and predicting Cyril’s delivery of the tutorial could player behavior. certainly not. From our experience, it is Our final tutorial, by Alex Champandquite unusual to illustrate game AI conard from AiGameDev.com (headquarcepts with hand puppets and physical tered in Austria), was a bit unusual in not props including various gardening focusing on a technical topic but rather equipment—but as we could all see, on the relation between two communithis worked well. Presenters worried ties: academic game AI researchers and about keeping their audiences awake commercial game developers. There has during early morning sessions are long been a perception from the game advised to watch the recording of Cyrindustry that what academic AI researchil’s talk for clues. ers do is either irrelevant because they do The second tutorial was given by not understand the real problems in game Dan Ashlock from the University of development or good ideas that unfortuGuelph in Canada. Dan is a mathematinately do not work; academic game AI

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researchers, on the other hand, tend to think that the game industry’s apparent fear of “real” AI is due to conservatism or sheer ignorance. Alex tried to explain how incentives and motivations differ between these two communities, and suggested that the status quo is not too bad— many academic researchers would have little to gain by getting involved with the games industry, and vice versa. However, Alex pointed out a few possible research areas for those who want to cross the industry-academia border. Those areas include game mining, network communication optimization, procedural content generation and the design of indie games around new AI concepts. III. Special Sessions

The conference hosted four special sessions dedicated to dissimilar aspects of CI and games. These sessions were proposed to the CIG organizing committee, advertised and run by special session organizers. The Emotion in Games special session, organized by Kostas Karpouzis, Tom Ziemke, and Georg ios N. Yannakakis, focused on various aspects of emotional sensing, synthesis and modeling in games using CI/AI techniques; six papers were presented in that session. The Game Mining special session, organized by Christian Bauckhage, Olana Missura, Thomas Gaertner, Kristian Kersting and Christian Thurau, hosted four presentations with a focus on mining large-scale data sets from game applications. Two papers focusing on learning challenges for car racing were presented during the CI in Racing Games special session, organized by Daniele Loiacono and Julian Togelius. Finally, the AI and CI for real-time strategy games special session (Johan Hagelbäck, Stefan Johansson, and Mike Preuss chaired the session) included four papers dedicated to AI/CI within strategy games. IV. Competitions

The conference featured no less than five competitions, two of which had multiple tracks. The competitions run

during the third and forth day of the conference; as is the tradition during CIG, the competitions are given a prominent place in the program, as each competition typically involves a large number of both faculty and students participating, and are fun to watch. Most of these competitions centered on submitting an AI agent that could play the game the competition was based on as well as possible. The team that could provide the best controller architecture would win the competition. Most competitions saw between five and 20 competing teams each, and in those competitions the winners were awarded cash prizes sponsored by the IEEE CIS Technical Committee on Games. The Ms. Pac-Man competition was organized by Simon M. Lucas and centered on the eponymous classic arcade game from the early 80s. Winners of the competition were Emilio Martin, Moises Martines, Gustavio Recio and Yago Saez from Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain, whose bot “Pac-mAnt” beat the others on the high-score list. It was noted that despite improvements in the submitted agents since last year, there is still a long way to go before beating the best human player. Another of the more established competitions was the simulated car racing competition, which has been running since 2007.This year, the competition was organized by Daniele Loiacono, Pier Luca Lanzi and Martin Butz, and was based on the TORCS open source racing game. The competition was won by the AUTOPIA team, led by Enrique Onieva from the National Research Council in Madrid, Spain; their car controller was based on fuzzy logic and incorporated both offline and online learning. In addition to the main track, which worked similarly to real-world F1 race, a “demolition derby” track was held where the objective was to be the “last car standing”; unfortunately, there were no submissions for this track. The 2K-BotPrize competition, an interactive Turing test realized through Unreal Tournament, was organized for the third year by Phil Hingston, and was won by Raul Arrabales and Jorge

Muñoz of Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain. The winning bot was based on a cognitive architecture intended to simulate consciousness, but was apparently also good at simulating combat. Based on an open-source clone of Nintendo’s legendary platform game, the Mario AI Championship was organized by Sergey Karakovskiy, Noor Shaker, Julian Togelius and Georgios N. Yannakakis, and included three tracks. Two of them (the Gameplay and Learning tracks) were won by Slawomir Bojarski and Clare Bates Congdon

was declared, but for the second round of the competition which was run at the AIIDE conference a month and a half later, the technical issues were resolved and a number of teams participated. V. Panel

An interactive panel session named The Future of Game AI took place on the third day of the conference. CIG General Chairs Georgios N.Yannakakis and Julian Togelius moderated a discussion among four well-known and respected panelists who represented both the AI and games academia, and the games industry. Simon M. Lucas (University of Essex), Alex Champandard (AIGameDev.com), Steve Rabin (DigiPen Institute of Technology and Nintendo of America) and Michael Mateas (University of California, Santa Cruz) were asked a set of questions about the future of game AI and engaged in a fruitful discussion with the conference room audience, and also gave their views on questions raised by the online spectators of the panel session. VI. Social Activities

FIGURE 3 The banner of IEEE CIG, sponsored by IT University of Copenhagen and designed by Steffi DeGiorgio.

from the University of Southern Maine, USA. The Level Generation track differed from most other competitions by not focusing on agents playing a game, but rather constructing levels for it that were then played and evaluated by human players. It was won by Ben Weber from University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. A newcomer to competition flora was the first StarCraft AI competition, which was organized by Johan Hagelbäck and Mike Preuss, with help from Ben Weber. Due to technical problems and lack of entries no official winner

The conference organizers put an emphasis on the social activities of CIG given the tradition inherited from all previous successful CIG symposia. During the conference reception on the first evening of the conference, the delegates could play several games developed by ITU students. Food and drinks were accompanied by an audiovisual DJ/VJ performance with a CI and games theme. Some delegates from far away places were surprised by finding a student-run pub right next to the lecture theatre, but the organizers explained that this is perfectly normal in Scandinavia. The next day, CIG delegates visited the Tivoli amusement park in the center of Copenhagen. The conference dinner was hosted at the Scandinavian-cuisine Madklubben restaurant on the third day. The conference’s social activities concluded with a rain-soaked canal tour of Copenhagen and a lunch during the day after the conference.

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VII. Awards

The best paper award was decided through a public vote. The four papers that had received highest scores from the program committee were presented back-to-back in a special “best papers” session, and all registered participants could vote for one of these papers. While all four papers were certainly of very high standard, the winners of the vote and, thereby, the best paper award were Ben Weber, Arnav Jhala and Michael Mateas from University of California, Santa Cruz for their paper “Reactive Planning Idioms for MultiScale Game AI”. The winning paper

VIII. CIG Supporters

The conference was sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and the IT University of Copenhagen, Center for Computer Games Research. It also received a donation from the IEEE Denmark Chapter, and support from local game developer

IX. The Future of CIG

The 2010 IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games was a great experience—at least for us, and as far as we could tell, for most of the participants as well—and we eagerly look forward to the next edition of the event, IEEE CIG 2011, which will take place in Seoul, Korea, August 31-September 3. We hope to see many familiar faces there and even more people who are new to the CIG community. Maybe we’ll meet you there?

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of computer games in this exciting field. Perhaps in time, lessons in school will be taught in a gaming format where students will compete with teachers and video games may soon replace traditional textbooks.

But until then, the game is far from over so do keep updating us with your research findings, feedback and suggestion. Only then can we keep up the game and attain a high score every time.

Innovation doesn’t just happen. Read first-person accounts of IEEE members who were there.

IEEE Global History Network

www.ieeeghn.org 14

Ubisoft Massive and the AiGameDev.com Web site.

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Happy Gaming!

Photo: NASA

Editor’s Remarks

presents a complete architecture based on reactive planning for playing StarCraft; this architecture has the ability to work both tactically and strategically at the same time, and has shown very good perfor mance in tests against human players.