Hiroyuki Iida

Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · School of Information Science

The 26th Computer Olympiad was held online during August/September 2023. With 102 participating programs competing in 32 events, the event was a success.

The digital marketplace has rapidly grown, transitioning the market of video games from physical localized experiences to more networked, expanded, virtual spaces. With a highly competitive business market, platform governance policy allows for the emergence of rapidly growing publishing platforms for digital video games such as the Steam platform....

The 25th Computer Olympiad was held online during July/August 2022. With 53 participating programs competing in 18 events, the event was a success.

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) have been considerably used for assessing the individual’s performance in various contexts. The optimal number of options in MCQs is a debatable issue, followed by contradictions and discussions, and is needed for a firm conclusion from empirical and hypothetical findings. This study aims to link theoretical concept...

From the perspective of audiences, game refinement (GR) theory is a theory and measurement that was frequently used to assess the enjoyment and complex features of games. We conjectured that when we play a strategy game, there is a physical information process in our minds which subject to Newton’s laws. It focuses on the uncertainty of game outcom...

Soccer (or association football) is now the most popular sports game in the world. Various underlying factors may explain its reasons to be popular. However, there is no underlying explanation as to why the nature of the game processes was appealing to all people of all ages. However, measuring such subjective metric were empirically challenging an...

A good solo player is not necessarily a good team player. Team games add an extra aspect to games: teamwork, which may increase the skill ceiling to master the game. The responsibility towards the outcome of the game will be divided among all the players in the team, where having more players might make the game easier as the responsibility of each...

The 24th Computer Olympiad was held online during August/September 2021. With 60 participants competing in 22 events, the event was a success. This raises the question as to whether the ICGA and its members are best served by having future Olympiads online or returning to the in-person format.

The game ’Mafia’ is a logic puzzle that has been a top-rated party game played worldwide. Many studies have been dedicated to determining the best character combination to keep players engaged while analyzing the overall death toll. Although it has only two-sided plays, there are multiple combinations of characters in which each character’s rules a...

People have enjoyed solving puzzles for decades because of the challenge and the satisfaction derived from solving problems. However, although previous researches focused on the puzzle’s complexity, strategy, and solving automatically, few studies worked on sorting out puzzles from a solvability way related to the stochastic elements among the solv...

Technology advancements allowed the development of action games that packed multifaceted play in a single game while requiring fast-paced movements. Since modern action game is composed of boss battles, evaluating them was scarcely investigated. In this study, the analysis of the boss battle was conducted based on the God of War (GoW) series, where...

A physical phenomenon represented through a sudden change of acceleration, termed ‘jerk’ (or jolt), is a compelling phenomenon that humans feel and has been seen in practical application in comfort and wear-and-tear effects in mechanical and engineering domains (for instance, in a daily situation, jerk can be experienced when we take an elevator)....

The attraction of games comes from the player being able to have fun in games. Gambling games that are based on the Variable-Ratio schedule in Skinner’s experiment are the most typical addictive games. It is necessary to clarify the reason why typical gambling games are simple but addictive. Also, the Multiarmed Bandit game is a typical test for Sk...

Challenges in education have continuously been addressed by integrating gamification, but a gap remains for game design principles that support user engagement. This paper outlines results obtained from integrating challenge-based gamification into an elementary school classroom to examine the emergence of student engagement and learning-related be...

Artificial intelligence (AI) had emphasized functional utility and performance optimization, while entertainment science synthesized the foundation of entertainment by aggregating value functions and reward systems. AI search and game environment provided the utility to identify entertaining elements as a new form of the scientific venture but lack...

An arcade game is one of the earliest forms of electronic entertainment in the history of modern video games. Although arcade games have simple rules, people retain their interest and remain enjoyable on the game-playing experience. Since arcade games were considered infinite games in general, this study investigates arcade games’ nature to mechani...

The intersection of artificial intelligence and entertainment science via games had led to fruitful development in both fields. Empathic technology in the entertainment medium is a promising trend that bridges both worlds. This workshop provides the discussion space for those interested in its application, societal issues, risks, and best practices...

The 23rd Computer Olympiad was held November/December 2020. As a consequence of the global pandemic, for the first time the competitions were fought online. This involved creating new rules that were, in large part, dependent on having the participants cooperate on organizing and conducting the events. The event was a success and will be repeated o...

The first AIES workshop, conducting in conjunction with the IFIP-ICEC conference (https://www.ifip-icec.org), aims to establish a discussion panel at the intersections of artificial intelligence (AI) and entertainment science areas. The theme is "towards empathic entertainment technology." By utilizing entertainment computing activities, such as vi...

The compensation system called komi has been used in scoring games such as Go. In Go, White (the second player) is at a disadvantage because Black gets to move first, giving that player an advantage; indeed, the winning percentage for Black is higher. The perceived value of komi has been re-evaluated over the years to maintain fairness. However, th...

The checkmate problem in Shogi (Japanese Chess) is a puzzle within the game itself. These puzzles have enjoyed a long play and have been the subject of centuries of analysis. The subject of this research is defining the aesthetic criteria of great Shogi problems, and finding new methods for composing interesting checkmate problems in Shogi. First w...

Due to the advent of the Internet, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have been enjoyed worldwide by many players simultaneously, and game publishers’ revenues have reached billions of dollars from subscriptions alone. Frequent updates (e.g., versioning) and new contents (e.g., quest system) are the typical strategies adopted...

Over history, games have served multiple purposes. It serves as a fun activity for players who need the entertainment to become test-beds for artificial intelligence. Solving games is beneficial in providing a better understanding of how information is progressing throughout the game. Uncertainty in games affects the way a game is solved and the wa...

The gaming industry had rapidly been expanding globally, where it encompasses more than the purpose of recreational and increasingly becomes more immersive and engaging, and potentially leads to pathological gaming behaviors that lead to addiction. Such experience of engagement and addiction involves understanding the fundamental functions of the h...

The notion of comfort with respect to rides, such as roller coasters, is typically addressed from the perspective of a physical ride, where the convenience of transportation is redefined to minimize risk and maximize thrill. As a popular form of entertainment, roller coasters sit at the nexus of rides and games, providing a suitable environment to...

This book gathers the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Computational Science and Technology 2020 (ICCST 2020), held in Pattaya, Thailand, on 29–30 August 2020. The respective contributions offer practitioners and researchers a range of new computational techniques and solutions, identify emerging issues, and outline future res...

The game refinement theory focuses on the game designer perspective, where its application in various types of games provides evidence of the occurring paradigm shift. Utilizing the logistical model of game outcome uncertainty, it provides a platform for incorporating gamified experience observed in games to be adopted in domains outside of game wh...

The advent of industrial 4.0 ushered a new era in the manufacturing industry where merely optimizing the available resources is not enough to fulfill the need of the growing market. Various approaches have addressed the assembly line balancing (ALB) problem for decades. Although solving the ALB problem is crucial, a bottleneck may still occur over...

The 8-sliding puzzle game, with its characteristic, is beneficial to human logical training and well-known single-agent game worldwide. This study is interested in determining the attractiveness of the game by analyzing the inner mechanism of the game. By adopting total steps to solve the game and the success rate as the game progress model, the ga...

Game refinement theory has been studied to derive a measurement of game sophistication. Recently, it has been developed as physics in mind, which may relate to the state of player's feelings such as satisfaction and comfort in mind. This article explores a link between game refinement theory and reinforcement schedule. A notion of winning hardness...

Analyzing the effect of value change in the MIN/-MAX search algorithm towards gameplay can be challenging. The single conspiracy number (SCN) is an indicator that can reflect such information. In this paper, SCN is utilized to identify different factors and analyze patterns that influenced a 5-in-a-row game called GoBang. SCN values from various Go...

This paper explores the nature of the Go game. Go has been played on different size of the board in its long history where it was born in 2356 BC and played on 9×9 board, and later played on 13×13, 15×15, 17×17, 19×19, and 21×21 board. Self-play experiments using an open-source implementation of AlphaZero, namely LeelaZero, as the artificial intell...

This paper explores the evolutionary changes of Chinese chess variants such as Chinese dark chess. A computer program is created for each variant and self-play experiments are performed to collect many data such as the average number of possible moves and game length. These data are analyzed to examine the degree of game sophistication, while game...

This paper presents a novel technique for classifying several camera operations in videos. First of all, we obtain a series of 2D motion vector (MV) fields by applying an existing MV estimation method. Then, a 2D MV histogram is generated in polar coordinates. The histogram shows that how many MVs in each frame share the similar magnitude and orien...

The process of 3D reconstruction is a basic problem in Computer Vision. However, recent researches have been successfully addressed by motion capture systems with body worn markers and multiple cameras. To recover 3Dreconstruction from fully-body human pose by single camera still remains a challenging problem. For instance, noisy background, variat...

Variants of best-first search algorithms and their expansions have continuously been introduced to solve challenging problems. The probability-based proof number search (PPNS) is a best-first search algorithm that can be used to solve positions in AND/OR game tree structures. It combines information from explored (based on winning status) and unexp...

DouDiZhu, a multiplayer game with incomplete information, is the most popular card game in China. Although there are many DouDiZhu card games in the world, the specific characteristics of classical DouDiZhu card games are a harmonious combination of player numbers, player characters (landlords and peasants), deck numbers, and scoring systems. Howev...

Game refinement theory has been used as a reliable tool for measuring the attractiveness and entertainment of games, which is derived from a game information progress model and has been applied in various games. This study aims to explore the entertainment of popular multiplayer game-Chinese checkers. The experiments in this study investigated the...

This paper explores an innovative way to find the comfortable settings of a newly designed game under development using a computer program. A Japanese crossword game ‘MyoGo Renju’ has been chosen as a benchmark for this research, whereas some important aspects such as fairness and engagement are evaluated to find the most optimum settings for the p...

The development of games had been seen as an essential field of study in artificial intelligence. Although game concepts have been adopted in various problem domains, understanding the nature of game playing’s underlying mechanism has been limited. This study investigates such a mechanism by adopting a logistic model of game outcome uncertainty whe...

This paper incorporates discussion about game refinement theory and the flow model to analyze simulation data collected from two types of arcade games. A mathematical model of the arcade game processes is formulated. The essence of the arcade games is verified through the game-playing processes of players. In particular, challenge setup could contr...

This paper explores the game sophistication of a party game is called Murder Mystery Game (MMG), which is very popular in teenagers, recently it was boom developed in China and Japan. For players, they have to promote game story process by performing the role which was assigned to them, finally, players need to find out who is the “murderer”, rever...

Gomoku (also called "Five in a row") is one of the earliest popular checkerboard games invented by humans. In computing research, a tree-based data structure and its branching factor is the common technique of analyzing such board game. While eye-tracking techniques have been used for decades in interpreting human behaviors and improving human-comp...

Hearthstone is an attractive and tactical card collection game and has millions of monthly active users (MAU) all over the world. In this research, the entertainment assessment of Hearthstone is measured by using the game refinement (GR) theory. Previous studies have reported that GR measure is a reliable tool to measure sophistication of board gam...

This paper explores a new perspective of finding the best tournament structures by focusing on two aspects (apart from the number of matches): competitiveness development and ranking precision. Competitiveness development emphasizes the importance of participants’ motivation while keeping the matches exciting whereas ranking precision reflects the...

Probability-based Proof Number Search (PPN-Search) is a best-first search algorithm that possesses a unique nature. It combines two kinds of information from a tree structure, namely, information from visited nodes and yet to be visited nodes. Information coming from visited nodes is determined based on winning status. On the other hand, informatio...

Table tennis is one of the most popular sports in the world. With a history of just over 100 years, table tennis has slowly become the seventh-largest sport in the world. However, it is unclear whether the improvement actually makes the game better or worst. As such, a consistent quantification approach is needed. In this paper, game refinement (GR...

The game refinement (GR) theory has been applied to many different games for quantifying their entertaining impacts. It is assumed that when playing any type of game, the game information progress is encoded and transported in our mind, and it is likely that the acceleration of that information is subject to the forces and laws of physics; thus, GR...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a long-standing and healthy relationship with games where it becomes a popular application area for AI-driven research such as game playing, game design and so on. With the recent advancement of AI game-playing programs that had exceeded human capabilities, fairness becomes an important issue to be addressed in orde...

This paper presents two directions of game evolution using the multiplayer incomplete information game-Mahjong and two-person complete information game-Chess. The directions of these games show the transitions from higher uncertainty to lower uncertainty and vice versa, whereas the game refinement measure (GR) had been employed for the assessment....

Players can change their interest in continuing playing due to many reasons, such as the game content available to them. Therefore, game upgrades play an important role as they have the potential to influence players, being it a “double-edged sword”, as players may like the new challenges or not. Among the active players, “whales” are those players...

Games are attractive and engaging due to the complexity they pose to the player. Some games are complex enough which made them attractive to play. However, popular games would lose their attractiveness due to the large advantage of initiative. High-performance AI like AlphaZero suggests from their actual games played that advantage of the first pla...

This paper explores the entertainment environment that focuses on platform transformation based on the respond of the user's demand. Improvement factor has been introduced to identify the key concept that was related to the perceived enjoyment. A player model was analyzed based on the perspective of user psychology. Scale-Rating questionnaires were...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in learning through games. However, learning through games has never been measured; thus, failed to attract many investors in this field. As such, the goal of this paper is to identify the concept of progress curves in edutainment games using the proposed "Curiosity Model" or momentumin-mind. The i...

This paper explores the nature of DouDiZhu which is an incomplete-information multi-player game and the most popular card game in China. While there are many DouDiZhu-like card games in the world, standard DouDiZhu card game is particularly characterized by its harmonic combination of several factors including the number of players , player's roles...

This paper explores the nature of DouDiZhu which is an incomplete-information multi-player game and the most popular card game in China. While there are many DouDiZhu-like card games in the world, standard DouDiZhu card game is particularly characterized by its harmonic combination of several factors including the number of players, player’s roles...

Since the era of Chinook, a computer program had won its first title against Marion Tinsley in the game of draughts. While most computer program in a variety of games has been designed to be a competitive opponent, it had derailed from one of the crucial aspects of games: fosters learning. This paper proposes a paradigm shift, from the foregoing me...

Gamification and E-learning are the application of game-based elements and game design techniques. Many entertainment and learning platforms have applied gamification to increase motivation and engagement. Game refinement theory is a new game theory which concerns about the entertaining aspects of games using a game sophistication measure that is d...

This paper explores the game sophistication of a classic video game called BattleCity. We choose two research target, one is the original version without AI was published by Namco in 1985 year, another one is establish by Python language and enemy use Breadth-First-Search (BFS) and Depth-First-Search (DFS) method to against human player. We compare...

Games are attractive and engaging due to the complexity they pose to the player. Some games are complex enough which made them attractive to play. However, popular games would lose their attractiveness due to the large advantage of initiative. High-performance AI like AlphaZero suggests from their actual games played that advantage of the first pla...

Games are attractive and engaging due to the complexity they pose to the player. Some games are complex enough which made them attractive to play. However, popular games would lose their attractiveness due to the large advantage of initiative. High-performance AI like AlphaZero suggests from their actual games played that advantage of the first pla...

This paper explores the environment of entertainment focusing on platform transformation and what expectation for near future to respond to the demand of the users. Improvement factor has been introduced to identify key concept that were related with the perceived enjoyment. A player model was envisioned and analyzed based on the perspective of use...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in learning through games. However, learning through games has never been measured; thus, failed to attract many investors in this field. As such, the goal of this paper is to identify the concept of progress curves in entertainment and edutainment games using the proposed Curiosity Model or moment...

Game refinement theory has been used as a reliable tool for measuring the attractiveness and entertainment of games. A game refinement measure is derived from a game information progress model and has been applied in various games. This research aims to explore the entertainment of popular multiplayer game-Chinese checkers. The experiments in this...

Experiments on groups of Checkers programs, playing by majority voting, were performed to investigate performance and stability. Homogeneous groups, copies of the same program, was used to perform these experiments instead of heterogeneous group that was more complicated by factors of different programs. Experiments were performed based on a search...

Gamification has been widely applied to various fields to boost the user experience and engagement. Most businesses now have implemented gamification elements into their business models to increase their customer retention. These elements, often called the Customer Loyalty Programs have helped businesses retain their customer base by ensuring that...

Single Conspiracy Number (SCN) is a concept trying to measure the difficulty of getting MIN/MAX value over a threshold point for a current root node. This paper discusses on an analysis of a single conspiracy number within a game of checkers. The experiment was conducted in Checkers because Checkers has relatively small search space compared to oth...

Single Conspiracy Number (SCN) is a concept trying to measure the difficulty of getting MIN/MAX value over a threshold point for a current root node. This paper discusses on an analysis of a single conspiracy number within a game of checkers. The experiment was conducted in Checkers because Checkers has relatively small search space compared to oth...