BC University Student’s Breakthrough in Adaptive A.I. Could Revolutionize Video Game Production

Video game production is poised to take a leap forward thanks to the work of University of British Columbia student Mike Vlad Cora. His project was part of Accelerate BC, an internship program that connects up-and-coming researchers in the province with BC companies for short-term, applied research projects.

Cora’s research into making video games learn and adapt their behaviours, to create a more challenging and entertaining gaming experience for players has also laid the foundation of a system that can save developers months of production time. He took some advanced AI algorithms and experimented with ways of attaching them to existing game code so that they could automatically control a wide array of behavioral parameters. The result of his work is the foundation of a system that’s able to learn to do things like selecting the best animation to play in response to certain player movements autonomously. Usually it takes developers months of fine tuning to reach levels of realistic action that makes game play satisfying.

“This can be a very time consuming process,” said Cora. “So I tried to see how we can speed up this process by taking some of that manual work and make it automatic.”

Edoardo de Martin, Studio General Manager at Next Level Games believes the innovation will allow the company’s creative people to spend more time focusing on the quality and experience of the game, rather than getting animations to queue up properly.

“We figure it could save up to six months production time. That’s a huge time savings for us.”

But Cora also believes his research has wider implications, and one of his goals was to simplify the AI algorithms so they could be used in many other applications.

Still in a gaming context, he says “if the AI adapts to different players’ styles then you’ll always have a new experience when you play it, and much more variety in the game.”

Read the entire article on IT Business.