Using AI to design board games • Hacker News Board

Re: Using AI to design board games

#31

Post by eru » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 12:43 PM UTC

rndmcnlly0 wrote: post #30

eru wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given enough money, you can outsource the error function to mechanical turk. Or to go more meta (and possibly cheaper): Make designing a good error function part of a meta GA-run, and let those functions be judged by comparing their judgements with human judgements.

Given the effort the play a game and the inter-subject noise in a numerical judgement, I think a better use of Mechanical Turk would be to ask the player to do some blame assignment. That is, instead of rating a game as 4-stars, they could perhaps give a thumbs up/down to particular rules or sets of rules in abstracted representation of the game. This kind of feedback extracts several more bits of information from th…

Yes, I also thought of giving multi-dimensional feedback, instead of just a single number, when writing the comment.

Re: Using AI to design board games

#32

Post by wtracy » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 1:56 PM UTC

rndmcnlly0 wrote: post #26

wtracy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I've been kicking around the idea of using evolutionary algorithms to test gameplay balance, and it's cool to see that someone else is already working on it.

Before you jump to evolutionary algorithms, note "The Problem with Evolution" section in the OP. This was written by a guy who knows what he's doing with evolution, and it's interesting to see him turning to MCTS given his previous success with evolution. The gist is that games are fragile with respect to mutations (motivating the need for a search paradigm not based on gradualism). This fragility may not exhibit its…

Thanks for pointing that out.

The project I was thinking of was going to be a tower defense game, and I wasn't planning on trying to develop any rules automatically. Rather, I was thinking in terms of using an evolutionary system to pick weapon and enemy strengths that lead to balanced gameplay.

So, I would probably get away with it, but I'm wide open to different ideas.

Re: Using AI to design board games

#33

Post by alanfalcon » Thu, Jan 05, 2012, 7:48 PM UTC

MichaelGagnon wrote: post #13

kiba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an obscure reference to use. That show aired from 1991 to 1994, when I was a mere toddler.

As far as pop-culture goes, I think Clarissa still holds the cake for female programmer characters. Acid burn (from Hackers) is a close second...

My winner is Veronica Mars's Mac whose scheme to get a new car was downright evil genius (scalable too, but she chose to limit herself). Of course, Burn was right, RISC changed everything, though not yet in desktop PCs.