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Intelligent Systems and Digital Games Events and Competitions

One of the most important steps in the development of research and systems projects, in general, is to know the area and what there is of technology, in other words, to know the state of the art and what else has been used by other developers. For this, knowledge or even participation in research events and competitions in the area can be interesting. Today I write this article with some tips for events and competitions in the area of games and intelligent systems applied to games, which can be interesting to follow or even participate.

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One of the most important steps in the development of research and systems projects, in general, is to know the area and what there is of technology, in other words, to know the state of the art and what else has been used by other developers. Knowledge or even participation in research events and competitions in the area can be interesting. Today I write this article with some tips for events and competitions in the area of games and intelligent systems applied to games, which can be interesting to follow or even participate.

The victory of intelligent systems against humans in games has created many historic milestones for the area of artificial intelligence. From Garry Kasparov against DeepBlue (IBM) in 1994 to Lee Sedol against AlphaGo (DeepMind) in 2016, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been beating humans in board games. More recently, new victories have brought milestones to AI history, having already conquered games like Starcraft and Dota 2, the field of study continues to grow and conquer new milestones.

It is a fact that artificial intelligence has been evolving every year, and as we have seen, digital games have shown themselves to be excellent environments for the application and training of these systems. This is because of the relatively low cost and ease of application.

Another fact is the recent exorbitant growth of the digital games market, and the advancement of hardware that allows the development of increasingly beautiful, realistic, and complex games. Nvidia itself, maker of graphics cards (GPU) has focused efforts on developing hardware focused on artificial intelligence applications. This is important because more advanced and complex intelligent system algorithms consume a lot of machine processing, and this is a factor that can hinder the application of these algorithms in various types of systems, including games. For the development of a commercial game, a good optimization so that the game runs on weaker computers is very important, as it significantly increases the game’s audience.

Finally, with all the advances and gains in these areas, we can imagine a near future with more complex intelligent systems applied to commercial games in different ways, whether in terms of analysis or control of agents, NPC (Non-Player Character), and enemies within the game, thus making the games more realistic and much more challenging.

These are just some of the reasons why it is, in addition to being fun, important for us to work on research and development in this area that links digital games to intelligent systems. First, let’s present some scientific congresses and events:

We started with the IEEE CoG (IEEE Conference on Games), an excellent event for research and work related to games in general, but with a lot of opening for work in the field of artificial intelligence applied to games. The event has a section with several Intelligent Systems competitions playing different games, ranging from Snake and Space Invaders to Dota 2 and Starcraft. It’s a cool annual event to both attend and follow [1].

Another interesting congress for those from the area is the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), which, in addition to the classic space for presentations and publications, also organizes a Starcraft competition between Intelligent Systems [2].

SBGames is another congress that must be mentioned. In addition to being an annual Brazilian congress, it is aimed at any research and digital game projects, ranging from serious games to market research or specific development techniques, e.g. artificial intelligence [3].

Through AICrowd it is possible to participate in MineRL Competition, competitions where Intelligent Systems learn to play Minecraft and perform various tasks in the game through Project Malmo and MineRL [4, 5].

The Student StarCraft AI Tournament (SSCAIT) is another super cool competition that is always happening. Here students and non-students can submit their smart systems to compete playing Starcraft. Competitions can be viewed live via Twitch [6].

Diambra Dueling AI Arena promotes intelligent system competitions by playing fighting games against each other. It is also possible to follow the competitions through Twitch [7].

In addition to the events, it can be interesting to know, follow or even try to publish in journals aimed at these areas of research. Some examples I can cite are;

I also leave as a bonus tip, a differentiated Game Jam made by the AI and Games channel, whose objective is, in addition to developing a game, also developing an intelligent system using existing artificial intelligence techniques. A really fun event to follow and attend called AI and Games Jam [8, 9].

Did I forget any important link to a congress, event, competition or journal? Do you have any questions or suggestions? Leave it in the comments!

References:

[1] IEEE Conference on Games <https://ieee-cog.org/>

[2] AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment <https://sites.google.com/view/aiide2021>

[3] SBGames <https://www.sbgames.org/>

[4] MineRL Competition <https://minerl.io/competition/>

[5] Project Malmo API <https://github.com/microsoft/malmo>

[6] Student StarCraft AI Tournament <https://sscaitournament.com/>

[7] Diambra Dueling AI Arena <https://diambra.artificialtwin.com/>

[8] AI and Games Channel <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCov_51F0betb6hJ6Gumxg3Q>

[9] AI and Games Jam 2021 <https://itch.io/jam/aiandgames-2021>