| Earlier this year, researcher Michael cook created video games using Angelina, an artificial intelligence system. Now Angelina has created a new game for the holidays, A Puzzling Present, which has broadened the features Angelina is working with to include advanced mechanisms like anti-gravity controls that improve game-play. |
Created by PhD student Michael Cook Angelina ("A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named ANGELINA") was special because she was creating games from scratch with a little help from her human counterparts. By dividing the concept of a computer game up into three defined “species,” or sub-tasks—maps, layouts, and rule sets—Cook and his compatriots at Imperial College in London helped their system auto-generate some simple arcade games.
Now, Cook has released a game called A Puzzling Present which is a lot more complex than Angelina's previous games. Instead of a simple interface with maps and obstacles, the latest game now include new mechanics for the player at each level. In the new game, users help Santa escape some fiendish and fun puzzles.
For example, in the first level of A Puzzling Present, hitting x (or a touch-screen b key in the mobile version) gives the main character, Santa an anti-gravity power that sends him to the top of the screen and hitting x again sends him back down. These mechanics, Cook says, were created artificially by Angelina for this particular game as part of a new system he developed called Mechanic Miner.
On his blog, Cook described how Mechanic Miner works: start with a level you can't normally solve and invent a new mechanism that could help solve this level (like the ability to jump very high, or bounce off walls), and then test the level for playability.
Cook says he hadn't planned on building Mechanic Miner back in March. But creating the system became possible when he discovered flixel-android—a Java port of a game library called Flixel—which allows Angelina to bridge the gap between Java (which Angelina understands) and ActionScript (which platform games are written in). “It was really a way of letting Angelina make changes to a game directly, and then be able to see what effect those changes had, by simulating the game,” Cook told Ars Technica.
The result is something a little closer to a game a human might be interested in investing an entire train commute in playing. Whereas before Angelina generated rule sets that defined the way the players obstacles appear in the games, Cook says his Miner is trying to replace that parameter with “something more flexible and much more interesting.”
Give out A Puzzling Present for free from the Google Play store.
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