Slashdot Mirror

Yes, Cameron's work was one of our sources of inspiration. The Ludi system that produced Yavalath is clearly a milestone in research on automatic game design. Another source of inspiration was my own work on automatic game design for simple PacMan-like games, which was carried out at the same time as Cameron's work and is described in this paper:
http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2008An.pdf
In general, this line of research is still in its infancy, as we are trying to figure out new ways of evaluating game quality and representing various aspects of games.

The original papers describing the work can be found here:
http://julian.togelius.com/Font2013Towards.pdf
and
http://julian.togelius.com/Font2013A.pdf

Similar evolutionary techniques have been used to generate a number of different types of game content, including Starcraft maps, Super Mario levels, rocks, dungeons, weapons... Here's an overview:
http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2011Searchbased.pdf

The original papers describing the work can be found here:
http://julian.togelius.com/Font2013Towards.pdf
and
http://julian.togelius.com/Font2013A.pdf

Similar evolutionary techniques have been used to generate a number of different types of game content, including Starcraft maps, Super Mario levels, rocks, dungeons, weapons... Here's an overview:
http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2011Searchbased.pdf

The original papers describing the work can be found here:
http://julian.togelius.com/Font2013Towards.pdf
and
http://julian.togelius.com/Font2013A.pdf

Similar evolutionary techniques have been used to generate a number of different types of game content, including Starcraft maps, Super Mario levels, rocks, dungeons, weapons... Here's an overview:
http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2011Searchbased.pdf

"Driving game AI hasn't improved much but frankly that's because there's not a lot to think about with driving games."

If you were right in the second part of your statement, everything I've been doing in the last two and a half years would be completely meaningless. As I don't want to have wasted these years, I prefer to think that you are not right.

There's a lot to do about driving game AI. First of all, learning to drive well on complicated tracks - without cheating - is not at all straightforward. Keeping the same performance when the user is allowed to create his own tracks is even harder - most racing games rely on knowing their prefabricated tracks well, tracks which are made from a set of standard segments in order to be tractable for the AI. When you introduce more than one car on the track it gets even trickier, as you have to deal with overtaking, collision avoidance, forcing collisions, etc.

And these are just the challenges associated with generating good driving. Interesting driving has even more challenges - should you drive nicely or aggressively? How do you make the driving look human-like? How do you adapt your skill level to that of your opponents? Etc...

You can see this blog post (with videos) and this paper for some of the research we are doing into this.

I'm all in favor of robot contests and all but more important, from my point of view, is the ability to share resources (such as test environments, robot chassis, sensors, vision-processing code, etc.) outside of the competition itself.

The biggest unnecessary impediment to robotic research right now, as I see it, is the difficulty researchers have in making comparisons between systems. You demonstrate your racing code on your robot in your test environment. I demo my code on my bot on my test track. The results are different but what does that show? On the other hand, if we both have the opportunity to try out our code on the same robot in the same test environment and mine clobbers yours, then the whole world can clearly see that mine works better. (Or, I suppose it is logically possible that yours would outperform mine, but that seems pretty unlikely, now doesn't it?)

We can get some kind of head-to-head comparisons in competitions, to be sure, but even then it is often just the environment that is the same. Typically the contestants are still providing all of their own hardware and software (as in the DARPA Grand Challenge and TFA). Even if we provide contestants the same hardware (xor the same software), limiting our comparison time to a couple of days a year impedes progress. We should be able to test our systems year 'round.

What we should be doing is making our code and our hardware and our test environments available to one another on a daily basis. If I want to see if I can evolve a better neurocontroller for your race car than you did, you should allow me to download my code onto your race car to drive around your track next month. Want to see if your code does a good job of driving my FIDO-class planetary rover over a simulated Martian surface? Download it onto my bot and run it in our Mars room or our outdoor OK/Mars test site. If you want to see if your rover hardware design can outperform the classic rocker-bogey design, pack it in a crate and ship it to us and we'll run it around our test environments for you.

Of course, it isn't quite as easy as that since the labs with the coolest robots in the world (which cost a pretty penny) can't spend all of their time and resources running experiments for other people at no cost - they have to get something out of the deal too. But that issue is not insurmountable.

I do applaud the provision of the simulation version of the race, which gets us running the same (simulated) hardware in the same (simulated) environment. (Interested readers should see http://julian.togelius.com/cig2007competition/ for the Java code. It is very simple and fun to try out.) The one question I have there, what is the license like for the simulator? I didn't see a README file or a note on the webpage. I didn't dig into individual source files or anything. Open source of some stripe would be nice, so that we can all improve it and share the improvements with one another.

Also, if anyone can suggest a more realistic racing simulation environment that could provide a better bridge to the real world competition that the simple 2D sim mentioned above, I'd appreciate it. An open interface is, of course, a must.

Dean

If anyone actually is interested in reading the papers discussing the experiments we did (many more than you see in the videos!), most of them are available on my website.

Some of them are of course better than others. I can recommend this one, about evolving general and specific driving skills, this one about co-evolution, this one about different learning techniques, and this one about modelling human driving and evolving tracks. There are several new ones, including one on physical cars, which are not on the website yet - mail me if you want a preprint!

All this assuming that anyone actually reads academic papers... sometimes it seems that not even the guy who writes the paper actually reads it. (Not true in my case, of course!)

If anyone actually is interested in reading the papers discussing the experiments we did (many more than you see in the videos!), most of them are available on my website.

Some of them are of course better than others. I can recommend this one, about evolving general and specific driving skills, this one about co-evolution, this one about different learning techniques, and this one about modelling human driving and evolving tracks. There are several new ones, including one on physical cars, which are not on the website yet - mail me if you want a preprint!

All this assuming that anyone actually reads academic papers... sometimes it seems that not even the guy who writes the paper actually reads it. (Not true in my case, of course!)

If anyone actually is interested in reading the papers discussing the experiments we did (many more than you see in the videos!), most of them are available on my website.

Some of them are of course better than others. I can recommend this one, about evolving general and specific driving skills, this one about co-evolution, this one about different learning techniques, and this one about modelling human driving and evolving tracks. There are several new ones, including one on physical cars, which are not on the website yet - mail me if you want a preprint!

All this assuming that anyone actually reads academic papers... sometimes it seems that not even the guy who writes the paper actually reads it. (Not true in my case, of course!)

If anyone actually is interested in reading the papers discussing the experiments we did (many more than you see in the videos!), most of them are available on my website.

Some of them are of course better than others. I can recommend this one, about evolving general and specific driving skills, this one about co-evolution, this one about different learning techniques, and this one about modelling human driving and evolving tracks. There are several new ones, including one on physical cars, which are not on the website yet - mail me if you want a preprint!

All this assuming that anyone actually reads academic papers... sometimes it seems that not even the guy who writes the paper actually reads it. (Not true in my case, of course!)

If anyone actually is interested in reading the papers discussing the experiments we did (many more than you see in the videos!), most of them are available on my website.

Some of them are of course better than others. I can recommend this one, about evolving general and specific driving skills, this one about co-evolution, this one about different learning techniques, and this one about modelling human driving and evolving tracks. There are several new ones, including one on physical cars, which are not on the website yet - mail me if you want a preprint!

All this assuming that anyone actually reads academic papers... sometimes it seems that not even the guy who writes the paper actually reads it. (Not true in my case, of course!)

I don't know much about the techniques underlying Forza 2, but I went over and talked to the guys who worked on Forza 1, and we compared our approaches. At least for the first game, what they are actually using is recorded trajectories on different track segments which are then spliced together at the junctions of segments, so as to create similar-looking behaviours on unseen tracks. The problem here is of course that the new tracks are constrained to being constructed out of the same segments as the driver has already been tested on - there is no generalization. The track designers for Forza simply had to live with this constraint.

We have ourselves gotten player modelling working fine with evolutionary neural networks, which can generalize, but the Forza team didn't consider these techniques reliable and fast enough in time for the release of the original game. Maybe things have changed with Forza 2.

There is some information on the Forza AI on http://research.microsoft.com/mlp/forza/, and our approach to modelling is described in http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2006Making.pdf.

Note that all this is about modelling behaviour, not about creating new behaviour from scratch; there are some papers on this on my website as well.

I don't know much about the techniques underlying Forza 2, but I went over and talked to the guys who worked on Forza 1, and we compared our approaches. At least for the first game, what they are actually using is recorded trajectories on different track segments which are then spliced together at the junctions of segments, so as to create similar-looking behaviours on unseen tracks. The problem here is of course that the new tracks are constrained to being constructed out of the same segments as the driver has already been tested on - there is no generalization. The track designers for Forza simply had to live with this constraint.

We have ourselves gotten player modelling working fine with evolutionary neural networks, which can generalize, but the Forza team didn't consider these techniques reliable and fast enough in time for the release of the original game. Maybe things have changed with Forza 2.

There is some information on the Forza AI on http://research.microsoft.com/mlp/forza/, and our approach to modelling is described in http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2006Making.pdf.

Note that all this is about modelling behaviour, not about creating new behaviour from scratch; there are some papers on this on my website as well.