EvoStar Paper Previews

Why not use the blog to post links to new papers from me and my group? At EvoGames (part of the EvoStar conference), in April in Copenhagen, my collaborators will be presenting the following papers:

Thorbjørn S. Nielsen, Gabriella Barros​, Julian Togelius and Mark Nelson​: General video game evaluation using relative algorithm performance profiles.
This is groundwork towards generating complete games in VGDL, the language used to describe games in the general video game playing competition. We show that random games can be separated from human designed games by testing a portfolio of algorithms on playing them.

Marco Scirea​, Mark J. Nelson and Julian Togelius: Moody music Generator: Characterising control parameters using crowdsourcing.
Marco has been working on his music generator for games for a while, and here we perform the first evaluation of its ability to express emotions. One of the main novelties of the paper is the evaluation method, which analyzes free-text descriptions.

Antonis Liapis​, Christoffer Holmgård Pedersen​, Georgios Yannakakis​ and Julian Togelius: Procedural Personas as Critics for Dungeon Generation.
For a while, Christoffer has been working on modeling player behavior in a bounded rationality framework. Here, we use those models in an evaluation function for search-based level generator.

Mohammad Shaker​, Noor Shaker​, Julian Togelius and Mohamed Abou-Zliekha: A Progressive Approach to Content Generation.
This work follows up on Mohammad's work on the AI-assisted design tool "Ropossum" for the physics-based puzzler Cut the Rope. In this paper, the generation problem is turned on its head, as play-sequences are first evolved and then content is found that could allow those sequences to be played.

Mohammad Shaker, Noor Shaker, Mohamed Abou-Zliekha and Julian Togelius: A Projection-Based Approach for Real-time Assessment and Playability Check for Physics-Based Games.
Another addition to the Ropossum toolbox, this paper presents a way of testing and visualizing playability through a form of occlusion modeling, where level components cast shadows of unplayability.