Editor's Note: This coverage from IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games 2009 was written by Luke Dicken. In particular, his article looks at some of the key research from the conference, and discusses the relationship between industry and academia as it came across during the event.
The IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) is a refreshing conference to my mind because you can put any three attendees in a room and get four different takes on what the conference is about. There are the Game Theorists, talking Nash Equilibria and mixed strategies (Hingston, 2009), the Serious Games people dealing with a more simulated what-if approach to the world — in scenarios such as Disaster Relief or Naval Strategy (Avery, Louis, & Avery, 2009). There are researchers working on a whole range of more classical board and card games such as Poker, Diplomacy or Risk (Kemmerling et al., 2009). And of course, there are the Video Game researchers — but even within this group there are further classifications to be made between those using games as a controlled environment in which to develop better AI techniques (Thompson & Levine, 2009), those using AI to push forward the use of technology in contemporary games (Galli, Loiacono, & Lanzi, 2009), and those using the marriage of advanced AI methodology with video games for some other end, such as behavioural modelling of players (Drachen, Canossa, & Yannakakis, 2009) or automated content creation (Tanimoto, Robison, & Fan, 2009).
Even within our own specific niche, our community remains very diverse. Not only diverse but also of a very high quality — it's hard to single out specific pieces of research to point to as being worth mentioning, because it almost certainly means excluding something else that deserves to be here. You can see the full proceedings here to make sure you don't miss anything. (Also see the bottom of this article for the full references from the previous paragraph!)
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