Improved Genetic Fuzzy Drivers presented at CIG 2018

Last week I presented at IEEE CIG 2018 (held in Maastricht, The Netherlands) our following step in our research about autonomous drivers for Car Racing Simulators, such as TORCS, titled «The Evolutionary Race: Improving the Process of Evaluating Car Controllers in Racing Simulators«.

As commented before by @jjmerelo and later by @fergunet, we designed with Mohammed Salem (University of Mascara) a driver’s AI in which two Fuzzy Subcontrollers were hybridized with a Genetic Algorithm.

In this work we present a better evaluation approach for the GA, combining three methods: heuristic track choosing, improved fitness functions, and race-based selection of the best.

The abstract of the work is:

Simulated car races have been used for a long time as an environment where car controlling algorithms can be tested; they are an interesting testbed for all kinds of algorithms, including metaheuristics such as evolutionary algorithms. However, the challenge in the evolutionary algorithms is to design a reliable and effective evaluation process for the individuals that eventually translates into good solutions to the car racing problem: finding a controller that is able to win in a wide range of tracks and with a good quantity of opponents. Evaluating individual car controllers involves not only the design of a proper fitness function representing how good the car controller would be in a competitive race, but also the selection of the best solution for the optimization problem being solved; this decision might not be easy when uncertainty is present in the problem environment; in this case, weather and track conditions as well as unpredictable behavior of other drivers. Creating a methodology for the automatic design of the controller of an autonomous driver for a car racing simulator such as TORCS is an optimization problem which offers all these challenges. Thus, in this paper we describe an analysis and some proposals to improve the evaluation of optimized fuzzy drivers for TORCS over previous attempts to do so. It builds on preliminary results obtained in previous papers as a baseline and aims to obtain a more competitive autonomous driver via redesign of the fitness evaluation procedure; to this end, two different fitness functions are studied in several experiments, along with a novel race-based approach for the selection of the best individual in the evolution.

And the presentation is:

You can check our paper in the proceedings of the conference.

Enjoy it!

(And cite us as usual :D)

Our TORCS driving controller presented at EvoGAMES 2017

Last week, @jjmerelo presented at EvoGAMES 2017 (inside Evo* 2017) our work titled «Driving in TORCS using modular fuzzy controllers».

This paper presents a novel car racing controller for TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator), which is based in the combination of two fuzzy subcontrollers, one for setting the speed, and one to control the steer angle. The obtained results are quite promissing, as the controller is quite competitive even against very tough TORCS teams.

The abstract of the paper is:

«When driving a car it is essential to take into account all possible factors; even more so when, like in the TORCS simulated race game, the objective is not only to avoid collisions, but also to win the race within a limited budget. In this paper, we present the design of an autonomous driver for racing car in a simulated race. Unlike previous controllers, that only used fuzzy logic approaches for either acceleration or steering, the proposed driver uses simultaneously two fuzzy controllers for steering and computing the target speed of the car at every moment of the race. They use the track border sensors as inputs and besides, for enhanced safety, it has also taken into account the relative position of the other competitors. The proposed fuzzy driver is evaluated in practise and timed races giving good results across a wide variety of racing tracks, mainly those that have many turning points.»

There was an interactive presentation at the conference, together with a poster:

The paper is available online from: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-55849-3_24

Enjoy (and cite) it! :D

 

Tenemos el segundo bot más humano DEL MUNDO…

…jugando a Unreal Tournament 2004. :D

José L. Jiménez, estudiante de informática de la Universidad de Málaga, dirigido por Antonio Fernández Leiva y por mí ha creado un bot, llamado NizorBot, a partir del ExpertBot que hicieron Francisco Aisa y Ricardo Caballero, que ha obtenido el segundo puesto (considerando la humanidad (humanness) del mismo) en el BotPrize 2014, celebrado dentro del CIG 2014.

Resultados de la competición BotPrize 2014 (primeros puestos)

La competición se basa en un Test de Turing que los bots deben pasar frente a jueces humanos. Éstos se enfrentarán a los bots en combates (Deathmatch) dentro del juego Unreal Tournament 2004. Durante dichos combates (en varias tandas), los jueces marcarán a cada uno de sus rivales como humano o bot en base a su criterio sobre el comportamiento que observen en el jugador.

Además, este año se ha añadido la presencia de un gran número de jueces off-line, es decir, ‘fuera del juego’, que visualizan los enfrentamientos y deciden también qué jugadores son humanos y cuáles no.

Esto le da más valor al resultado que otros años, ya que estos jueces cuentan con un punto de vista ‘menos limitado’ que los participantes en el juego.

El bot ha sido implementado mediante algoritmos evolutivos interactivos, en los que un controlador humano interviene cada cierto tiempo en dos sentidos:

• Ajustando parámetros del algoritmo (controlador experto en el algoritmo)
• Respondiendo a cuestiones sobre el jugador y el juego (controlador experto en el juego).

En ambos casos, el desarrollo del algoritmo (su ejecución) se ve afectado y dirigido por este controlador, lo que hace que el bot evolucione de una forma más acorde con lo que éste espera. En este caso, para comportarse de la manera más humana posible.

José está en proceso de escritura de su Proyecto Fin de Carrera y, a continuación, los tres trabajaremos en un artículo describiendo todo el proceso.

¡Estad atentos! :D

Aplicación de Programación Genética para la generación de bots del RTS Planet Wars en CoSECiVi 2014

Este trabajo se publicó dentro del Primer Congreso de la Sociedad Española para las Ciencias del Videojuego (CoSECIVI), que se celebró en conjunción con el Gamelab 2014 en Barcelona.

En él se presentó el artículo titulado «Designing Competitive Bots for a Real Time Strategy Game using Genetic Programming», cuyo resumen (en inglés) es:

The design of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine for an autonomous agent (bot) in a game is always a difficult task mainly done by an expert human player, who has to transform his/her knowledge into a behavioural engine. This paper presents an approach for conducting this task by means of Genetic Programming (GP) application. This algorithm is applied to design decision trees to be used as bot’s AI in 1 vs 1 battles inside the RTS game Planet Wars. Using this method it is possible to create rule-based systems defining decisions and actions, in an automatic way, completely different from a human designer doing them from scratch. These rules will be optimised along the algorithm run, considering the bot’s performance during evaluation matches. As GP can generate and evolve behavioural rules not taken into account by an expert, the obtained bots could perform better than human-defined ones. Due to the difficulties when applying Computational Intelligence techniques in the videogames scope, such as noise factor in the evaluation functions, three different fitness approaches have been implemented and tested in this work. Two of them try to minimize this factor by considering additional dynamic information about the evaluation matches, rather than just the final result (the winner), as the other function does.
In order to prove them, the best obtained agents have been compared with a previous bot, created by an expert player (from scratch) and then
optimised by means of Genetic Algorithms. The experiments show that the three used fitness functions generate bots that outperform the optimized human-defined one, being the area-based fitness function the one that produces better results.

La presentación del artículo se puede ver aquí:

El artículo se puede encontrar en: http://gaia.fdi.ucm.es/sites/cosecivi14/es/papers/24.pdf

Esperamos que os guste.

Y que nos citéis. :D

Modelando el conocimiento de un experto en Unreal Tournament (CEDI 2013)

En concreto, hemos presentado el artículo «Modelling Human Expert Behaviour in an Unreal Tournament 2004 Bot» dentro del Primer Simposio Español en Entretenimiento Digital, incluido dentro del CEDI 2013.

Y vosotros diréis, ¿por qué un artículo en inglés en un congreso español?. Pues porque los artículos en inglés que sean seleccionados podrán enviarse a un número especial de la revista Entertainment Computing (Elsevier). A ver si hay suerte. :D

El trabajo presenta el diseño de un bot (jugador autónomo) para jugar a Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2K4). Dicho bot ha sido creado por Francisco Aisa y Ricardo Caballero, modelando el conocimiento y comportamiento de un jugador experto en dicho juego (el primero de ellos ;D).

La presentación podéis verla en:

Que la disfrutéis (y nos citéis, claro). :D

Saludos.

Unreal Expert Bots at IWANN 2013

Last week there was held IWANN 2013 at Tenerife, an international conference mainly devoted to researches inside the neural networks scope. In it, Antonio Fernández Leiva, Raúl Lara and Me organized the Special Session on Artificial Intelligence and Games.

There were five works in the session, one of them «Designing and Evolving an Unreal Tournament— 2004 Expert Bot«.

It describes the designing and improvement, through off-line (not during the game) evolution, of an autonomous agent (or bot) for playing the game Unreal Tournament 2004. This was created by means of a finite state machine which models the expert behaviour of a human player in 1 vs 1 deathmatch mode, following the rules of the international competition.

Then, the bot was improved by means of a Genetic Algorithm, yielding an agent that is, in turn a very hard opponent for the medium-level human player and which can (easily) beat the default bots in the game, even in the maximum difficulty level.

The presentation can be seen at:

Moreover, you can watch one example of the evolution in the following video:

Finally, the Unreal Expert and Genetic bot’s source code are available at https://github.com/franaisa/ExpertAgent

Enjoy them. ;)

Super Mario autonomous agents at LION 2013

Recently, inside the last LION 7 (2013) conference (Special Session on Games and Computational Intelligence) there was presented the paper entitled «FSM-Based Agents for Playing Super Mario Game».

It describes the implementation and test of an autonomous agent which can play Super Mario game better than an expert user can do (in some trained levels).
It is build starting from a Finite State Machine and applying an Evolutionary Algorithm.

The presentation is:

You can watch one example of the obtained agent playing a game here:

Enjoy it. ;)

About Game Bots and Ambient Assisted Living

Last week we were in IWANN Conference, held in Torremolinos (Málaga), presenting two different works. The first one is about evolving IA bots for playing games in the Google AI Challenge. The basic idea is to improve the parameters of a hard-coded bot. Results shown that the default parameters we thought are important may be not work so good, and we can learn a lot of emerging behavior of the trained bot.

Here is the presentation:

Citation is here

The second one, is about a project I was working in last year. It’s about Ambient Assisted Living, Context-awareness and other stuff like that. The presentation is not so awesome. It was presented in the satellite workshop IWAAL.

You can download the paper in Springerlink here.