Julian Togelius: Algorithms That Play & Design Games

Julian Togelius Keynote Talk (CEC) at WCCI 2018
Abstract: "The race is on to develop algorithms that can play a wide variety of
games as well as humans, or even better. We do this both to understand
how well our algorithms can solve tasks that are designed specifically
to be hard for humans to solve, and to find software that can help
with game development and design through automatic testing and
adaptation. After recent successes with Poker and Go, the attention is
now shifting to video games such as DOOM, DoTA, and StarCraft, which
provide a fresh set of challenges. Even more challenging is designing
agents that can play not just a single game, but any game you give it.
A different kind of challenge is that of designing algorithms that can
design games, on their own or together with human designers, rather
than play them. I will present several examples of how methods from
the computational intelligence toolbox, including evolutionary
computation, neural networks, and Monte Carlo Tree Search, can be
adapted to address these formidable research challenges.
"