PDF《Ebner, Marc and Levine, John and》

Ebner, Marc and Levine, John and Lucas, Simon M.

and Schaul, Tom and Thompson, Tommy and Togelius, Julian (2013) Towards a video game description language. In: Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games. Dagstuhl Follow-ups,

6 . Dagstuhl Publishing, Wadern, pp. 85- 100. ISBN

9783939897620 (In Press) , http://dx.doi.org/10.4230/DFU.Vol6.12191.85 This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/45278/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright ? and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the Strathprints administrator: [email protected] The Strathprints institutional repository (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk) is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde research outputs. It has been developed to disseminate open access research outputs, expose data about those outputs, and enable the management and persistent access to Strathclyde'

s intellectual output. Towards a Video Game Description Language Marc Ebner1 , John Levine2 , Simon M. Lucas3 , Tom Schaul4 , Tommy Thompson5 , and Julian Togelius6

1 Ernst Moritz Arndt Universit?t Greifswald, Institut für Mathematik und Informatik [email protected]

2 Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Strathclyde [email protected]

3 School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Essex [email protected]

4 Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York [email protected]

5 School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Derby [email protected]

6 Center for Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen [email protected] Abstract As participants in this Dagstuhl session address the challenge of General Video Game Playing (GVGP), we have recognised the need to create a Video Game Description Language (VGDL). Unlike General Game Playing, we have envisioned GVGP will not require a prescribed language to facilitate understanding of the logic of the game: requiring the computational agent to ascertain these facts for itself. However, we would still require means to de?ne the wide range of problems the GVGP agents may face for the purpose of classi?cation. Not only would such a language provide means to encapsulate the features and mechanics of a game for the purposes of human understanding, but also provide context for the evaluation of GVGP agents having completed playing. Outside of the issues of classi?cation, there is also the opportunity for automatic game gen- eration. Given the intent of the GVGP group to work within a framework akin to the one of the Physical Travelling Salesman Problem (PTSP), we aim to attach a code-base to the VGDL compiler that derives implementations of these games from the de?nition that can be used in con- junction with GVGP. Implementing such a compiler could provide numerous opportunities;

users could modify existing games very quickly, or have a library of existing implementations de?ned within the language (e.g. an Asteroids ship or a Mario avatar) that have pre-existing, paramet- erised behaviours that can be customised for the users speci?c purposes. Provided the language is ?t for purpose, automatic game creation could be explored further through experimentation with machine learning algorithms, furthering research in game creation and design. In order for both of these perceived functions to be realised and to ensure it is suitable for a large user base we recognise that the language carries several key requirements. Not only must it be human-readable, but retain the capability to be both expressive and extensible whilst equally simple as it is general. In our preliminary discussions, we sought to de?ne the key requirements and challenges in constructing a new VGDL that will become part of the GVGP process. From this we have proposed an initial design to the semantics of the language and the components required to de?ne a given game. Furthermore, we applied this approach to represent classic games such as Space Invaders, Lunar Lander and Frogger in an attempt to identify potential problems that may come to light. In summary, our group has agreed on a series of preliminary language components and started to experiment with forms of implementation for both the language and the attached framework. In future we aim to realise the potential of the VGDL for the purposes of Procedural Content ? Marc Ebner, John Levine, Simon M. Lucas, Tom Schaul, Tommy Thompson and Julian Togelius;