The GIFT Users Symposia began in 2013 with the goal to capture successful implementations of GIFT from the user community and to share recommendations leading to more useful capabilities for authors, researchers, and learners of Adaptive Instructional Systems (AIS). The attached proceedings resulted from papers accepted for the 8th Annual GIFT Users Symposium held virtually (due to COVID-19) on 28-29 May 2020. It is a excellent collection of contributions covering all aspects of AIS implementation, with special attention towards future training and education concepts centered around collaboration and team dynamics.

This Handbook presents methods to advance the understanding of interdependencies between the well-being of human societies and the performance of their biophysical environment. It showcases applications to material and energy use; urbanization and tech

The essential guide to solving algorithmic and networking problems in commercial computer games, revised and extended Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games, Second Edition is written from the perspective of the computer scientist. Combining algorithmic knowledge and game-related problems, it explores the most common problems encountered in game programing. The first part of the book presents practical algorithms for solving “classical” topics, such as random numbers, procedural generation, tournaments, group formations and game trees. The authors also focus on how to find a path in, create the terrain of, and make decisions in the game world. The second part introduces networking related problems in computer games, focusing on four key questions: how to hide the inherent communication delay, how to best exploit limited network resources, how to cope with cheating and how to measure the on-line game data. Thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded to reflect the many constituent changes occurring in the commercial gaming industry since the original, this Second Edition, like the first, is a timely, comprehensive resource offering deeper algorithmic insight and more extensive coverage of game-specific networking problems than ordinarily encountered in game development books. Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games, Second Edition: Provides algorithmic solutions in pseudo-code format, which emphasises the idea behind the solution, and can easily be written into a programming language of choice Features a section on the Synthetic player, covering decision-making, influence maps, finite-state machines, flocking, fuzzy sets, and probabilistic reasoning and noise generation Contains in-depth treatment of network communication, including dead-reckoning, local perception filters, cheating prevention and on-line metrics Now includes 73 ready-to-use algorithms and 247 illustrative exercises Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games, Second Edition is a must-have resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking computer game related courses, postgraduate researchers in game-related topics, and developers interested in deepening their knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings of computer games and in learning new approaches to game design and programming.

We share our modern world with bots – chatbots to converse with, roombots to clean our houses, spambots to fill our e-mail inboxes, and medibots to assist our surgeons. This book is about computer game bots, virtual companions who accompany us in virtual worlds or sharpen our fighting skills. These bots must be believable, that is human players should believe they are interacting with entities operating at a human level – bots are more fun if they behave like we do. This book shows how to create believable bots that play computer games, and it discusses the implications of making them appear human. The chapters in this book present the state of the art in research on and development of game bots, and they also look beyond the design aspects to address deep questions: Is a bot that plays like a person intelligent? Does it have emotions? Is it conscious? The topic is inherently interdisciplinary, and the work draws from research and practice in many fields, such as design, creativity, entertainment, and graphics; learning, psychology, and sociology; artificial intelligence, embodiment, agents, machine learning, robotics, human–computer interaction, and artificial life; cognition and neuroscience; and evolutionary computing. The contributing authors are among the leading researchers and developers in this field, and most of the examples and case studies involve analysis of commercial products. The book will be of value to graduate students and academic researchers in artificial intelligence, and to engineers charged with the design of entertaining games.