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!