New Game – Sex, Lies and Rape

I was a bit hesitant about some of the games coming out of ANGELINA over the last fortnight. In particular, it became obvious to me that the more autonomous the system became the higher the likelihood it would produce something that might offend, upset or libel people. Sex, Lies and Rape doesn’t include anything you wouldn’t find in a moderate Google SafeSearch, and is entirely safe for work. But the theme it is trying to convey, and some of the selections it makes as a result, do make for quite an unsettling experience.

As before, here’s a YouTube playthrough of the level:

And if you’d like to play it yourself, you can find it here.

There won’t be any more games for a while as I need to take two days’ holiday, finish my paper, present at GaME – all in the next week! There should be more games up around the end of the month though.

New Game – The Conservation of Emily

The first game from the AIIDE run of game generation is up. It’s called The Conservation of Emily and it’s based on an article about UK politicians being involved in illegal logging companies. If you’d like to play the game, you can do so by clicking here. There’s also a YouTube playthrough of the game available, which I’ve embedded below in case you don’t feel like playing or it’s just a bit too fiddly (which ANGELINA and I are still working on somewhat).

It’s not up on the Games page yet but I’ll be doing that in early July when I’m over AIIDE, GaME and ICCC 2012…

On the Road to Aesthetics and Meaning

Believe me, I'm as sick of that Santa sprite as you are. He's not in the games any more.

I mentioned that I’m writing a paper about the latest edition of ANGELINA, but I haven’t really explained what it is that ANGELINA can do that’s different from a few months ago. It’s been very changeable up until about a week ago, but I’m finally producing games and getting reasonable results. This post is about what new capabilities ANGELINA has gained over the last few months, so that the games make the most sense when I post them soon.

Continue reading →

Easier Said Than Pun

I’m hoping to submit a paper to this year’s Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE to its friends) so radio silence on the site here is simply a symptom of lots and lots of coding over here, rummaging around in ANGELINA’s innards, putting in lots of new functionality. I’ve now come to a stop, so I can start generating games and writing about them. Watch this space, and ANGELINA’s Twitter feed, for playable links in the near future. There’s been lots of changes since Space Station Invaders and its ilk, but I won’t go into all of them here. I just want to focus on one particular bit of functionality that tickled me yesterday – ANGELINA has some basic wordplay skills now.

Continue reading →

Not The Nine A.M. News

I realise I’ve not put anything up regarding ANGELINA’s progress lately, and our research group had a very successful first ‘virtual meeting’ today via Google Plus, so I feel it’s time to update everyone, not just the other CCG researchers, on where ANGELINA is going.

Below is an image taken from the paper Automated Collage Generation – With Intent, written by my supervisor Simon Colton and a then-Masters student Anna Krzeczkowska (as well as contributions from Cambridge researchers Jad El-Hage and Stephen Clark). The collage was made by software that read a Guardian news article about the Afghanistan war, analysed the text for the most relevant words, and arranged Google Image results onto a canvas. This is a favourite example of the group because the images chosen are so apt – bombers, war graves, Afghani children.

It’s not the most elegant arrangement of images, but it’s powerful and entirely novel to the authors of the software. There was no way of telling what Guardian article the software would read (it chose whatever was being written about the day it ran) or the images retrieved. That, to me, is a really exciting bit of AI, producing something interesting to look at. I want some of that in ANGELINA.

Continue reading →

ANGELINA at EvoGames 2012

I’m back from the conference in Malaga and I’m very proud to say that our paper, Initial Results From Co-operative Co-evolution For Automated Platformer Design, was awarded the Best Paper award for the EvoGames workshop! I’m obviously ecstatic, I had no idea we would receive this kind of reception. Congratulations also to the paper’s co-authors, Simon Colton (my supervisor) and Jeremy Gow (another group member, and Statistics Hero).

I’m taking the briefest of breaks and then I’m back to work. With a bit of luck we’ll be submitting some brand new ideas to the Computational Intelligence in Games conference, whose deadline is at the end of this month. Of course I’ll keep you updated on what those ideas are going to be, exactly, as well as game examples as and when they become available. If you’re on Twitter, now would be a great time to follow @gamesbyangelina, as there’s a good chance I’ll be taking advantage of the system for the first time in the coming weeks, in order to get live, human feedback on things that ANGELINA might not be totally sure of herself (like colour schemes).

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented or gotten in touch with me over the past few months. Everyone’s contributions and suggestions improve the system and help us put out our research. Thank you so much!

EvoGames 2012 Talk

It’s the morning of the last conference day here at EvoStar, and I’m sitting tapping this out while waiting for the final few events to begin. The conference actually spans the entire breadth of computational evolution and genetic programming research, so there are people here from the financial computing sector, from medical research labs, from exotic artistic science communities, and of course from the world of games research.

EvoGames, the games workshop in the conference, had some great talks (and a couple of very interesting posters) and also let me meet up with some of my favourite researchers too. We saw talks about adaptive game opponents, automatic camera shot composition for cutscenes, and ANGELINA featured in there somewhere too. If you’re interested in seeing my slides (unfortunately without the nice videos I slipped in) you can get the PDF of the slides here.

Hello to everyone I met at EvoStar this year! I had a great time. Back to ANGELINA from Sunday!

GitHub Projects

I’m beginning to put some code online at GitHub, especially code that I think might actually be useful to people (which is a very small subset, believe me). Up there currently is some code I made to demonstrate evolution, and I’ve also put up the current version of the APACE library I posted about ages ago. That’s it, really, I just wanted people to be aware. I’ll add a link on the main site here sometime too.

For those interested in APACE – it’s really not very functional right now. It needs better tools for creating walkable areas and placing items, which I don’t have in place yet. It’s also entirely undocumented. It’s really there right now in case someone wants to peek at some example code or hack it into shape themselves. I will be adding to it in my spare time though as I like the idea.

ANGELINA on GitHub

Palette Swaps and AI-sthetics

I’m working on a whole bunch of new systems now for a major extension to the platformer project that’s been in the press recently. My supervisor was keen to look at more creative angles on game design, and while initially somewhat skeptical about the idea I’ve really come around to it. I’ve been drawing up plans for a more artistically-minded ANGELINA (in all sense of the word) this week alongside similar work by other members of the group working in other areas of creativity.

Continue reading →

Science Journalism & Us

A lot of very mad things happened in the past 24 hours, most of which I’m trying to document on ANGELINA’s ‘In The Press’ page, but in short – Engadget, Kotaku, The Verge, New Scientist… the list goes on. Lots of people have been talking about ANGELINA, and I’ve been getting a huge amount of traffic over here. I just wanted to spend a few hundred words explaining why this matters to people like me, and why I’m so grateful when things like this happen.

Continue reading →