Knowledge acquisition for adaptive game AI

• Authors: Marc Ponsen;Pieter Spronck;Héctor Muñoz-Avila;David W. Aha
• Venue: Science of Computer Programming
• Year: 2007

Game artificial intelligence (AI) controls the decision-making process of computer-controlled opponents in computer games. Adaptive game AI (i.e., game AI that can automatically adapt the behaviour of the computer players to changes in the environment) can increase the entertainment value of computer games. Successful adaptive game AI is invariably based on the game's domain knowledge. We show that an offline evolutionary algorithm can learn important domain knowledge in the form of game tactics (i.e., a sequence of game actions) for dynamic scripting, an offline algorithm inspired by reinforcement learning approaches that we use to create adaptive game AI. We compare the performance of dynamic scripting under three conditions for defeating non-adaptive opponents in a real-time strategy game. In the first condition, we manually encode its tactics. In the second condition, we manually translate the tactics learned by the evolutionary algorithm, and use them for dynamic scripting. In the third condition, this translation is automated. We found that dynamic scripting performs best under the third condition, and both of the latter conditions outperform manual tactic encoding. We discuss the implications of these results, and the performance of dynamic scripting for adaptive game AI from the perspective of machine learning research and commercial game development.