Research on general video game playing aims at designing agents or content generators that can perform well in multiple video games, possibly without knowing the game in advance and with little to no specific domain knowledge. The general video game AI framework and competition propose a challenge in which researchers can test their favorite AI methods with a potentially infinite number of games created using the Video Game Description Language. The open-source framework has been used since 2014 for running a challenge. Competitors around the globe submit their best approaches that aim to generalize well across games. Additionally, the framework has been used in AI modules by many higher-education institutions as assignments, or as proposed projects for final year (undergraduate and Master's) students and Ph.D. candidates. The present book, written by the developers and organizers of the framework, presents the most interesting highlights of the research performed by the authors during these years in this domain. It showcases work on methods to play the games, generators of content, and video game optimization. It also outlines potential further work in an area that offers multiple research directions for the future.

This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.

As has been pointed out by several industrial game AI developers the lack of behavioral modularity across games and in-game tasks is detrimental for the development of high quality AI [605, 171]. An increasingly popular method for ad-hoc behavior authoring that eliminates the modularity limitations of FSMs and BTs is the utility-based AI approach which can be used for the design of control and decision making systems in games [425, 557]. Following this approach, instances in the game get assigned a particular utility function that gives a value for the importance of the particular instance [10, 169]. For instance, the importance of an enemy being present at a particular distance or the importance of an agent’s health being low in this particular context. Given the set of all utilities available to an agent and all the options it has, utility-based AI decides which is the most important option it should consider at this moment [426]. The utility-based approach is grounded in the utility theory of economics and is based on utility function design. The approach is similar to the design of membership functions in a fuzzy set. A utility can measure anything from observable objective data (e.g., enemy health) to subjective notions such as emotions, mood and threat. The various utilities about possible actions or decisions can be aggregated into linear or non-linear formulas and guide the agent to take decisions based on the aggregated utility. The utility values can be checked every n frames of the game. So while FSMs and BTs would examine one decision at a time, utility-based AI architectures

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 34th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2021, held in Sydney, NSW, Australia, in February 2022.* The 64 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 120 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: Ethical AI, Applications, Classical AI, Computer Vision and Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Data Mining, and Network Analysis. *The conference was postponed from December 2021 to February 2022 and held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book includes a selection of revised and extended versions of the best papers from the seventh International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI 2015), held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 12 to 14 November 2015, which was composed of three co-located conferences: The International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications (ECTA), the International Conference on Fuzzy Computation Theory and Applications (FCTA), and the International Conference on Neural Computation Theory and Applications (NCTA). The book presents recent advances in scientific developments and applications in these three areas, reflecting the IJCCI’s commitment to high quality standards.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization, EMO 2017 held in Münster, Germany in March 2017. The 33 revised full papers presented together with 13 poster presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The EMO 2017 aims to discuss all aspects of EMO development and deployment, including theoretical foundations; constraint handling techniques; preference handling techniques; handling of continuous, combinatorial or mixed-integer problems; local search techniques; hybrid approaches; stopping criteria; parallel EMO models; performance evaluation; test functions and benchmark problems; algorithm selection approaches; many-objective optimization; large scale optimization; real-world applications; EMO algorithm implementations.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Advances in Computer Games, ACG 2021, which was held as a virtual event during November 23–25, 2021. The 22 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: learning in games; search in games; solving games; chess patterns; player modelling; and game systems.

The two-volume set LNAI 11431 and 11432 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems, ACIIDS 2019, held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in April 2019. The total of 124 full papers accepted for publication in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 309 submissions. The papers of the first volume are organized in the following topical sections: knowledge engineering and semantic web; text processing and information retrieval; machine learning and data mining; decision support and control systems; computer vision techniques; and databases and intelligent information systems. The papers of the second volume are divided into these topical sections: collective intelligence for service innovation, technology management, E-learning, and fuzzy intelligent systems; data structures modelling for knowledge representation; advanced data mining techniques and applications; intelligent information systems; intelligent methods and artificial intelligence for biomedical decision support systems; intelligent and contextual systems; intelligent systems and algorithms in information sciences; intelligent supply chains and e-commerce; sensor networks and Internet of Things; analysis of image, video, movements and brain intelligence in life sciences; and computer vision and intelligent systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference, SLAAI-ICAI 2018, held in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, in December 2018. The 32 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: ​intelligence systems; neural networks; game theory; ontology engineering; natural language processing; agent based system; signal and image processing.

This book presents the proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2020), held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, from 29 August to 8 September 2020. The conference was postponed from June, and much of it conducted online due to the COVID-19 restrictions. The conference is one of the principal occasions for researchers and practitioners of AI to meet and discuss the latest trends and challenges in all fields of AI and to demonstrate innovative applications and uses of advanced AI technology. The book also includes the proceedings of the 10th Conference on Prestigious Applications of Artificial Intelligence (PAIS 2020) held at the same time. A record number of more than 1,700 submissions was received for ECAI 2020, of which 1,443 were reviewed. Of these, 361 full-papers and 36 highlight papers were accepted (an acceptance rate of 25% for full-papers and 45% for highlight papers). The book is divided into three sections: ECAI full papers; ECAI highlight papers; and PAIS papers. The topics of these papers cover all aspects of AI, including Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems; Computational Intelligence; Constraints and Satisfiability; Games and Virtual Environments; Heuristic Search; Human Aspects in AI; Information Retrieval and Filtering; Knowledge Representation and Reasoning; Machine Learning; Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications; Natural Language Processing; Planning and Scheduling; Robotics; Safe, Explainable, and Trustworthy AI; Semantic Technologies; Uncertainty in AI; and Vision. The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the use of AI technology.