Recap Part 3: Generation from Collective Gameplay

In 2008, I implemented my first version of a system that plans character behavior and dialogue from recorded gameplay data.  This system combined the components described in Recap 1 and Recap 2 with a replay system, which automated a character by playing back fragments of log files (or one log in its entirety).

The planner is a bit like the Game AI equivalent of the Random Paper Generator.  It essentially randomly wanders between 5,000 log files, stitching together fragments of behavior and dialogue at run-time, while maintaining local coherence by critiquing log transitions for statistical likelihood.  This random stitching process is complicated by the fact that each character (customer and waitress) needs to observe the behavior of the other character, and select a sensible response from a log file.

More after the jump...

Recap Part 2: Dialogues with Data

Welcome back readers.  Another snow-day in Boston; good time to update the blog!  In this interactive post I will continue my recap of early experiments in automating characters with recorded gameplay data.  You will find a demo to play with at the end.

 

Human waitress chats with an AI customer, trained with 5,000 games.

After completing the Masters, I was anxious to get something truly interactive up and running as quickly as possible.  I thought I would start by looking at the chat text data, and I was inspired by reading a paper about the How May I Help You system at AT&T, an unsupervised system that learned correlations between salient phrase fragments and call routing decisions. I wondered if we could take a similar approach to learning patterns within chat text exchanges based on salient word sequences for different contexts within the restaurant scenario – e.g. getting seated, ordering, paying the bill, etc – and use them to automate a chat bot.

More after the jump….

First post. w00t!

People of Earth:

Welcome to my research blog!  I’m in the home stretch for the PhD, aiming to graduate in about a year (plus or minus a few months), and will use this blog to share my progress, and recap some earlier developments.  I’m hoping that blogging will help me collect my thoughts for the defense (and help me figure out where all the time went).

Screenshot from The Restaurant Game

I launched The Restaurant Game in early 2007, and proposed to generate character behavior and dialogue from log files of human-human interactions recorded online for my Masters thesis.  Needless to say, I grossly underestimated how hard it would be to automate behavior and dialogue from unconstrained online interactions (at least, to do it well enough for use in a ‘real’ game), and I’m still working on this for my PhD.

It’s been a pretty crazy project, as you might expect when you invite the general public on the internet to participate in your research. 

More after the jump...