Conference Program

Monday, September 7, 2009

8:30 – 9:00 Registration
9:00 – 9:10 Welcome
9:10 – 10:40 Tutorial 1: Kenneth O. Stanley – Practical Issues in Evolving Neural Network Controllers for Video Game Agents
10:40 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:30 Tutorial 2: James M. Vaccaro – Modeling and Simulation Framework of Real Urban and Board Games to Train Players
12:30 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 15:20 Keynote: Stefano Lecchi
15:20 – 15:45 Anders Drachen, Alessandro Canossa and Georgios Yannakakis. Player Modeling using Self-Organization in Tomb Raider: Underworld
15:45 – 16:10 Colin Ward and Peter Cowling. Monte Carlo Search Applied to Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering
16:10 – 16:30 Coffee Break
Session 1: Theory and Techniques
16:30 – 16:55 Philip Hingston. Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma for Species
16:55 – 17:20 Garrison Greenwood. Deceptive Strategies for the Evolutionary Minority Game
17:20 – 17:45 Simon Lucas. Temporal Difference Learning with Interpolated Table Value Functions
17:45 – 18:10 Leo Galway, Darryl Charles and Michaela Black. Improving Temporal Difference Game Agent Control Using a Dynamic Exploration Rate During Control Learning
Reception, Posters, and Defcon Competition
Poster Presentations (Politecnico’s porch outside Room S01)
18:10 – 19:30 Johan Hagelbaeck and Stefan J. Johansson. Measuring player experience on runtime dynamic difficulty scaling in an RTS game
Peter Burrow and Simon Lucas. Evolution versus Temporal Difference Learning for playing Ms. Pac-Man
Luis Peña, Sascha Ossowski and José-María Peña. vBattle: A new Framework to Simulate Medium-Scale Battles in Individual-per-Individual Basis
Daniel Cuadrado and Yago Saez. Chuck Norris rocks!
Su-Hyung Jang, Jong-Won Yoon and Sung-Bae Cho. Optimal Strategy Selection of NPC on RTS Game using Speciated Evolutionary Algorithm
Edgar Galvan-Lopez and Michael O’Neill. On The Effects of Locality in a Permutation Problem: The Sudoku Puzzle
Klaus Jantke. Dramaturgical Design of the Narrative in Digital Games: AI Planning of Conflicts in Non-Linear Spaces of Time
Steven Tanimoto, Tyler Robison and Sandra Fan. A Game-Building Environment for Research in Collaborative Design
18:10 – 19:30 Defcon Competition

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

8:30 – 9:00 Registration
Session 2: Board Games and Card Games
9:00 – 9:25 Marcin Szubert, Wojciech Jaśkowski and Krzysztof Krawiec. Coevolutionary Temporal Difference Learning for Othello”
9:25 – 9:50 Belal Al-Khateeb and Graham Kendall. Introducing a Round Robin Tournament into Blondie24
9:50 – 10:15 Jacek Mañdziuk and Krzysztof Mossakowski. Neural networks compete with expert human players in solving the Double Dummy Bridge Problem
10:15 – 10:40 Garrett Nicolai and Robert Hilderman. No-Limit Texas Hold’em Poker Agents Created with Evolutionary Neural Networks
10:40 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:00 Keynote: Yngvi Björnsson – General Game-Playing Systems
12:00 – 12:25 Chris Pedersen, Julian Togelius and Georgios Yannakakis. Modeling Player Experience in Super Mario Bros
12:25 – 12:50 Ben Weber and Michael Mateas. A Data Mining Approach to Strategy Prediction
12:50 – 14:30 Lunch & Botprize (Educafé Room)
Session 3: Ms Pac-Man, Super Mario and Car Racing
14:30 – 14:55 Luigi Cardamone, Daniele Loiacono and Pier Luca Lanzi. Learning Drivers for TORCS Through Imitation Using Supervised Methods
14:55 – 15:20 Julian Togelius, Sergey Karakovskiy, Jan Koutnik and Juergen Schmidhuber. Super Mario Evolution
15:20 – 15:45 Lori DeLooze and Wesley Viner. Fuzzy Q-Learning in a Nondeterministic Environment: Developing an Intelligent Ms. Pac-Man Agent
15:45 – 16:10 Ben Cowley, Darryl Charles, Michaela Black and Ray Hickey. Analyzing Player Behavior in Pacman using Feature-driven Decision Theoretic Predictive Modeling
16:10 -16:30 Coffee Break
Parallel Sessions
Session 4: Theory
16:30 -16:55 Maarten Schadd, Mark Winands and Jos Uiterwijk. ChanceProbCut: Forward Pruning in Chance Nodes
16:55 -17:20 Nicola Basilico, Nicola Gatti and Thomas Rossi. Capturing Augmented Sensing Capabilities and Intrusion Delay in Patrolling-Intrusion Games
17:20 -17:45 Michele Pace. How a Genetic Algorithm Learns to Play Traveler’s Dilemma Choosing Dominated Strategies (non Nash equilibrium) to Achieve Greater Payoffs.
17:45 -18:10 Wojciech Jaskowski and Krzysztof Krawiec. Formal Analysis and Algorithms for Extracting Coordinate Systems of Games
16:30 -18:10 Competition Session (Educafé Room)
Ms Pac-Man & Ms Pac-Man vs Ghost-TeamMs Pac-Man

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Session 5: Modeling
9:00 – 9:25 Markus Kemmerling, Niels Ackermann, Nicola Beume, Mike Preuss, Sebastian Uellenbeck and Wolfgang Walz. Is Human-like and Well Playing Contradictory for Diplomacy Bots?
9:25 – 9:50 Raul Arrabales, Agapito Ledezma and Araceli Sanchis. Towards Conscious-like Behavior in Computer Game Characters
9:50 – 10:15 Andrea Corradini and Manish Mehta. Evaluation of a Domain Independent Approach to Natural Language Processing for Game-like User Interfaces
10:15 – 10:40 Riccardo Berta, Francesco Bellotti, Alessandro De Gloria and Ludovica Primavera. A task annotation model for SandBox Serious Games
10:40 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:00 Keynote: Michael Mateas – AI Isn’t Just for Players: AI-based Authoring Tools
12:00 – 12:25 Erin Hastings, Ratan Guha and Kenneth Stanley. Evolving Content in the Galactic Arms Race Video Game
12:25 – 12:50 David Robles and Simon Lucas. A Simple Tree Search Method for Playing Ms. Pac-Man
12:50 – 14:30 Lunch & Botprize (Educafé Room)
Session 6: Simulated Car Racing
14:30 – 14:55 Enrique Onieva, David A. Pelta, Javier Alonso, Vicente Milanés and Joshué Pérez. A Modular Parametric Architecture for the TORCS Racing Engine
14:55 – 15:20 Diego Perez, Gustavo Recio, Yago Saez and Pedro Isasi. Evolving a Fuzzy Controller for a Car Racing Competition
15:20 – 15:45 Jorge Muñoz, German Gutierrez and Araceli Sanchis. Controller for TORCS created by imitation
15:45 – 16:10 Marc Ebner and Thorsten Tiede. Evolving Driving Controllers Using Genetic Programming
16:10 – 16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 – 18:10 Competition Session (Educafé Room)
Simulated Car Racing & Super Mario
18:10 – 18:40 IEEE CIS TC Meeting
21:00 Conference dinner

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Session 7: First Person Shooters
9:00 – 9:25 Matt Parker and Bobby D. Bryant. Backpropagation without Human Supervision for Visual Control in Quake II
9:25 – 9:50 Niels van Hoorn, Julian Togelius and Juergen Schmidhuber. Hierarchical Controller Learning in a First-Person Shooter
9:50 – 10:15 Joost Westra and Frank Dignum. Evolutionary Neural Networks for NPC’s in Quake III
10:15 – 10:40 Luca Galli, Daniele Loiacono and Pier Luca Lanzi. Learning a Context-Aware Weapon-Switching Policy in Unreal Tournament
10:40 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:00 Keynote: D.Stern and J. Quiñonero Candela (Microsoft Research) – Playing Machines: Machine Learning Applications in Computer Games
12:00 – 12:25 Martin V. Butz and Thies D. Lönneker. Optimized Sensory-motor Couplings plus Strategy Extensions for the TORCS Car Racing Challenge
12:25 – 12:50 Jacob Schrum and Risto Miikkulainen. Evolving Multi-modal Behavior in NPCs
12:50 – 14:30 Lunch
Session 8: Planning
14:30 – 14:55 Tommy Thompson and John Levine. Realtime Execution of Automated Plans using Evolutionary Robotics
14:55 – 15:20 Phillipa Avery, Sushil Louis and Benjamin Avery. Evolving Coordinated Spatial Tactics for Automonous Agents using Influence Maps
15:20 – 15:45 Haiqing Wang, Omar N. Malik and Alexander Nareyek. Multi-Unit Tactical Pathplanning
15:45 – 16:10 Attala Malik and Joerg Denzinger. Improving Testing of Multi-Unit Computer Players for Unwanted Behavior using Coordination Macros
16:10 – 16:30 Coffee Break
Session 9: Evolution
16:30 – 16:55 Tommy Thompson, Fraser Milne, Alastair Andrew and John Levine. Improving Control Through Subsumption in the EvoTanks Domain
16:55 – 17:20 David Keaveney and Colm O’Riordan. Evolving Robust Strategies for an Abstract Real-Time Strategy Game
17:20 – 17:45 Roberto Mercado and Zvi Retchkiman. Modeling the Game of Arimaa with Linguistic Geometry
17:45 – 18:10 Amine Boumaza. On the evolution of artificial Tetris players

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