Peter A. Mawhorter

Reactive planning idioms for multi-scale game AI

Many modern games provide environments in which agents perform decision making at several levels of granularity. In the domain of real-time strategy games, an effective agent must make high-level strategic decisions while simultaneously controlling individual units in battle. We advocate reactive planning as a powerful technique for building multi-scale game AI and demonstrate that it enables the specification of complex, real-time agents in a unified agent architecture. We present several idioms used to enable authoring of an agent that concurrently pursues strategic and tactical goals, and an agent for playing the real-time strategy game StarCraft that uses these design patterns.

Skald: Minstrel Reconstructed

Scott Turners Minstrel is considered a landmark story-generation system, cited as an important system in our fields history for the quality of its output. Other influential systems such as Meehans Tale-Spin have inspired modern successors, but although a few systems have followed Minstrels case-based approach, none of them use its “imaginative recall” technique. This paper details Skald, a publicly-released rational reconstruction of Minstrel that enables exploration of Turners work and discovery of new implications for future research. A key finding is a brittleness only hinted at in Turners publications: the story library, story templates, and the recall system must be tailored to one another for Turners original system to function. We show that this can be ameliorated through a number of techniques, however, from adding differential costs to transformations to removing the least-successful author-level actions. Another key finding is that Turners original “boredom” system limited leverage of the story library. An alternative and its results are presented here. What emerges from this work is a different picture of the original Minstrel than that currently present in the literature, as well as a new system, Skald, that sets the stage for future research to explore Turners ideas for story generation.