Synergies Between Robots and Games

Gita Sukthankar gitars@eecs.ucf.edu

Motivation

http://images.google.com/q=multi-robot+systems

UT3

Travian

Robotics: Strengths

n  Better formal representations of the physical world

n  More autonomous planning rather than reliance on scripting

n  Belief in the power of integrating machine learning algorithms

Robotics on CFP at the AAAI Conference on AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment (2012 and 2013)

Games: Human-Centered Design

Making experiences fun rather than frustrating Dynamic difficulty

adjustment

Games tell Stories

The power of narrative and character development

Games: Intuitive Control

Dedicated but impatient user base seeks fast control

Games: Modeling Group Behavior

Studying individual communication and trade patterns reveals hidden social structures

Predic'ng  Guild  Membership  in  Massively  Mul'player  Online  GamesHamidreza  Alvari1,  Kiran  Lakkaraju2  ,  Gita  Sukthankar1  ,  and  Jon  Whetzel2    1  University  of  Central  Florida,  Orlando,  Florida2  Sandia  Na'onal  Labs,  Albuquerque,  New  Mexico

Join  

Leave  

Switch  

No  Ac1on  

Rela1ve  Contribu1on  

Social  Ties  

Skill  Homophily  

Exis1ng  guild  

informa1on  

?  

Guild  predic1on  is  more  accurate  when  seeded  with  a  few  highly  central  members  rather  than  larger  numbers  of  less  influen1al.  

Future: Robots, Agents, and People

n  Future: scaling up not only the robots but the number of people dealing with the same robots.

n  Less focus on point-to-point interaction n  Social network and modeling techniques developed for

game analytics may be helpful in understanding the holistic system operation.

n  Call to action: ¨  More public datasets ¨  More shared testbeds for running experiments

Intelligent Agents Lab

http://ial.eecs.ucf.edu/ Ph.D. Students n  Hamidreza Alvari n  Rahmatollah Beheshti n  Erfan Davami n  Alireza Hajibagheri n  Astrid Jackson Alumni Bulent Tastan (Amazon), Ken Laviers (SRSU), JT Folsom-Kovarik (SoarTech), Fahad Shah (Microsoft), Bennie Lewis (Lockheed Martin), Mahsa Maghami (Microsoft), Yuan Chang (Google), Xi Wang (Sonobi) Sponsors: AFOSR YIP, NSF CAREER, DARPA CSSP