KEYNOTE: Designing and playing games with computational intelligence

Jialin Liu, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China. ABSTRACT: Games provide an ideal playground for AI researchers to study, explore, evaluate, and experiment with different ideas in a controllable and safe environment. As an important application and product, games also involve complex decision-making and creative design tasks. Games have played important roles in the development of computational intelligence, while different computational intelligence methods have been widely applied to playing and designing games. In this talk, I will show how different computational intelligence methods (e.g., generative models, reinforcement learning and evolutionary computation) could be harnessed to procedurally generate new game contents, from game levels to accompanying music that correlates with game difficulties. In addition, I will also show how novel computational intelligence techniques, especially evolutionary reinforcement learning, could be used to play a range of different games. I will conclude the talk by discussing current challenges and potential research directions.