[Colloq] Talk: Ian Horswill - Game Design for Classical AI - January 14, Noon, 108 WVH

[Biron, Jessica]

Game Design for Classical AI
Ian Horswill, Northwestern University

Wednesday, January 14th
Noon, 108 WVH

Reasoning using expressive symbolic representations is a central theme of AI research, yet there are surprisingly few deployed games, even within the game AI research community, that use this sort of "classical" AI. This is partly due to practical and methodological issues, but also due to fundamental mismatches between current game genres and classical AI systems. I will argue that if we want to build games that leverage high-end classical AI techniques like commonsense reasoning and natural language processing, we will also have to develop new game genres and mechanics that better exploit those capabilities. I will also present a design sketch of a game that explores potential game mechanics for classical AI.

Ian Horswill is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University.  He is a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he is Director of the Division of Graphics and Interactive Media, and was co-founder of Northwestern's Animate Arts Program. His research interests include interactive entertainment technologies and cognitive modeling for virtual characters, particularly modeling of emotion and personality.