Angry Birds meet EAs at EVO* 2019

Last 24 of April we presented the work «Free Form Evolution for Angry Birds Level Generation» at EVOApplications 2019 (EvoGAMES) a conference part of EVO* 2019, held in Leipzig (Germany).

The abstract of the work is:

This paper presents an original approach for building structures that are stable under gravity for the physics-based puzzle game Angry Birds, with the ultimate objective of creating fun and aesthetically pleasing Angry Birds levels with the minimum number of constraints. This approach consists of a search-based procedural level generation method that uses evolutionary algorithms. In order to evaluate the stability of the levels, they are executed in an adaptation of an open source version of the game called Science Birds. In the same way, an open source evolutionary computation framework has been implemented to fit the requirements of the problem. The main challenge has been to design a fitness function that, first, avoids if possible the actual execution of the simulator, which is time consuming, and, then, to take into account the different ways in which a structure is not structurally sound and consider them in different ways to provide a smooth landscape that eventually achieves that soundness. Different representations and operators have been considered and studied. In order to test the method four experiments have been carried out, obtaining a variety of stable structures, which is the first path for the generation of levels that are aesthetically pleasing as well as playable.

@amorag did a short presentation and later ‘defended’ a poster during the reception act. The presentation is a description of the poster:

Actually the poster was selected as the second best of the conference by the attendants. :D

Those interested can found the paper at Springer web: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-16692-2_9

Enjoy it… and cite us! ;D

EvoGAMES is coming… Check out the CFP

The deadline for submitting your paper to EvoGAMES (and the rest of Evo*) is now set (1 November).

EvoGAMES is a track of the European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation focused on the applications of bio-inspired algorithms in games.

The areas of interest for the track include, among others:
– Computational Intelligence in video games
  – Intelligent avatars and new forms of player interaction
  – Player experience measurement and optimization
  – Procedural content generation
  – Human-like artificial adversaries and emotion modelling
  – Authentic movement, believable multi-agent control
  – Experimental methods for gameplay evaluation
  – Evolutionary testing and debugging of games
  – Adaptive and interactive narrative and cinematography
  – Games related to social, economic, and financial simulations
  – Adaptive educational, serious and/or social games
  – General game intelligence (e.g. general purpose drop-n-play Non-Player Characters, NPCs)
  – Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS)
  – Affective computing in Games

Important dates are:
– Submission of papers: 1 November 2015
– Notification: 4 January 2015
– Camera-ready: 18 January 2015
– Evo* dates: 30 March – 1 April 2016

This year, the page limit has been increased up to 16 pages, so you could write more and more scientific content. :D

As usual, the accepted submissions will be included in the proceedings of Evo*, published in a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

For more info about the conference and the track you can visit the Main site of Evo* 2016.

See you in Porto!

Is entropy good for solving the game of MasterMind?

Well, it does. In another paper published in the Evostar conference, we compare several methods for measuring how good a combination is when compared to the others that could possibly be the solution; so far we had mostly used most parts (counting the number of non-zero partitions), but, in this paper, that compares our previous Evo method with another created by the coauthors, Maestro-Montojo and Salcedo-Sanz, we find that Entropy, at least for these sizes, is the way to go. Here’s the poster

You can access the paper Comparing Evolutionary Algorithms to Solve the Game of MasterMind, by Javier Maestro-Montojo, Juan Julián Merelo and Sancho Salcedo-Sanz (first and last authors from the University of Alcalá de Henares) online or request a copy from the authors.

Going a bit farther (and a bit faster) solving MasterMind using evolutionary algorithms

We left MasterMind last year in a good state using estimation of distribution algorithms; however, if we want to find a solution for higher dimensions (more colors, more pegs) we have to improve the number of evaluations. In this case we use something we call endgames; same as chess playing algorithms use a database of endgames for ending a game in a straightforward way, in MasterMind we can recognize a few occasions in which the search space is reduced drastically and it’s better either change the strategy or just change the search space. When we know the colors (that is, we obtain as many white+blacks as the length of the combination) the best is to just revert to exhaustive search over combination space; when the answer is 0 whites/blacks we can also exclude those colors from the search space and start, maybe with a smaller population.
This is what we do in the paper Improving and Scaling Evolutionary Approaches to the MasterMind Problem , which was presented a short time ago in the EvoGames workshop in Torino

During the presentation, Carlos Cotta and Carlos Fernandes played the game shown above.
Here’s the presentation, which you can download at ease. Picture credits are included in the notes.