Preliminary Ideas.

Well It's been a lot longer than I expected between blog post but at least I've got a bit to talk about what I've done in the last week.

I managed to decided upon which of the two topics I'm going to look at, I've decided to go with my third option partly based upon the feedback I received from the first Worksheet I submitted to Dr Özveren but also because of the articles I read over the weekend on "Learning AI". Learning AI does come under many different names, "Evolutionary AI", "Adaptive AI" etc, so I think a bit more explanation is required.

What I intend too look at, is the process of computer opponents "learning" how to play the game better, in the same way that human players do. I'm plan on looking specifically at how this would work in a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game and will base my experiment on this. I read a fantastic article on the subject called "Improving Adaptive Game AI With Evolutionary Learning" (http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/p.spronck/Pubs/PonsenCGAIDE.pdf) and this is what gave me the idea for my project.

I have just come back from a meeting with Dr David King, who has been proposed as my project supervisor at this stage, and after that meeting were we discussed my idea, where I would want to go with it, and he has suggested since I have until next Sunday to form a "Research Question", the question which my dissertation is intended to answer, I should just keep doing what I'm doing and read some more around the subject area and think about some specific "learning" techniques to look at as the whole area of "Learning AI" may be a bit too broad a subject area.

I have also found an open-source RTS engine developed by the University of Alberta called ORTS, Open Real Time Strategy, this engine is used by the University in an annual AI competition they run and so i feel it should be a good starting point for running experiments to test "Learning AI" algorithms on as there is an active development community, and since it is used specifically for AI competitions it should be able to accept different techniques.

So my plan for now is to go to the library, or have a look at some of the online databases, for copy's of the books mentioned in the "Improving Adaptive Game AI With Evolutionary Learning" article and continue to work on ORTS and make sure that it will be easy enough to use for my experiments.

Till Later,

Stuart
Feelin' Fine