Robert Zubek

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Founder at SomaSim

City of Gangsters is a commercial strategy game in which the player is principally challenged by navigating a complex and large-scale social network, in which every action resonates through the network and holds associated risks and rewards. Our procedurally-generated city results in a large social network with randomized and non-prescriptive confi...

City of Gangsters is a commercial strategy game with significant social modeling mechanics: it is a tycoon management game, where the player needs to work their social connections with a network of roughly 1200 NPCs to get things done, and NPC opinions about the player modulate the player's ability to succeed. We found logic programming to be well...

City of Gangsters is a commercial strategy game with significant social modeling mechanics: it is a tycoon management game, where the player needs to work their social connections with a network of roughly 1200 NPCs to get things done, and NPC opinions about the player modulate the player's ability to succeed. We found logic programming to be well...

City of Gangsters is a commercial strategy game in which the player is principally challenged by navigating a complex and large-scale social network, in which every action resonates through the network and holds associated risks and rewards. Our procedurally-generated city results in a large social network with randomized and non-prescriptive confi...

Finite state techniques are popular in entertainment software production, but they complicate the modeling of certain aspects of social engagement. In this paper we examine the problem of building probabilistic finite-state interaction models that allow both hierarchical composition of behaviors, and their parallel engagement. Finally, we propose a...

An introduction to the basic concepts of game design, focusing on techniques used in commercial game production. This textbook by a well-known game designer introduces the basics of game design, covering tools and techniques used by practitioners in commercial game production. It presents a model for analyzing game design in terms of three interco...

AIIDE 2014 is the second AIIDE event that has featured a playable experience track. This paper describes the seven entries that were accepted in the 2014 track, as well as the motivation behind the track and the criteria used to evaluate and accept entries. Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org)....

Finite state techniques are popular in entertainment software production, but they complicate the modeling of certain aspects of social engagement. In this paper we examine the problem of building probabilistic finite-state interaction models that allow both hierarchical composition of behaviors, and their parallel engagement. Finally, we propose a...

In this report I present hierarchical parallel Markov models for the creation of interactive social agents for video games and entertainment. The approach extends existing, popular character technologies for social, communicative interaction. First, adding the knowledge of temporal interaction structure enables natural language interaction on a tim...

This paper introduces a technique for participation in certain kinds of social interactions. By modeling their temporal structure explicitly using a hierarchy of concurrent Markov processes, we can track the development of the interaction robustly, and drive it forward in a coherent fashion. The approach is computationally inexpensive, and exhibits...

Introduction The AAAI Robot Challenge was established four years ago as a "grand challenge" for mobile robots. The main objectives of the Challenge are to (a) provide a task that will demonstrate a high level of intelligence and autonomy for robots acting in a natural, peopled, dynamic environment, (b) stimulate state-of-the-art robotics research t...

In this paper we present the MDA framework (standing for Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics), developed and taught as part of the Game Design and Tuning Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, San Jose 2001-2004. MDA is a formal approach to understanding games – one which attempts to bridge the gap between game design and development, game cri...

r-Strike. The techniques used in both systems are computationally inexpensive and easy to implement, which addresses the constraints found in most game development. Groo The Groo project attempts to create an efficient agent, or bot, that plays a first-person-shooter deathmatch game in a tactically intelligent manner. Our objective was to model an...

The AAAI Robot Challenge was established four years ago as a "grand challenge" for mobile robots. The main objectives of the Challenge are to (a) provide a task that will demonstrate a high level of intelligence and autonomy for robots acting in a natural, peopled, dynamic environment; (b) stimulate state-of-the-art robotics research to address thi...

While it seems desirable to have game characters that interact socially with human players, implementing such interactions in game contexts remains difficult. This paper argues that the implementation of rudimentary social skills can be simplified considerably by explicitly modeling situations in which the agent may find himself and, furthermore, i...

Computer game character design and robotics share many of the same goals and computational constraints. Both attempt to create intelligent artifacts that respond realistically to their environments, in real time, using limited computation resources. Unfortunately, none of the current AI architectures is entirely satisfactory for either field. We di...

Computer games research has focused strongly on improving the tactical intelligence of computer opponents.

In an attempt to solve as much of the AAAI Robot Challenge as possible, five research institutions representing academia, industry and government, integrated their research on a pair of robots named GRACE and GEORGE. This paper describes the second year effort by the GRACE team, the various techniques each participant brought to GRACE, and the inte...

Groo (Generic Robot, Object-Oriented) and tt14m (Trash-Talking 14-year-old Moron) are two systems that use simple and computationally inexpensive artificial intelligence mechanisms to produce engaging character behavior for computer games, while remaining within the performance constraints of modern game development. Groo engages in intelligent tac...

being-in-the-world is an intelligent agent capable of living autonomously in a Multi-User Dungeon world. In this paper we present a hybrid-architecture approach to building such an agent, discuss the successes and pitfalls of this technique, and potential improvements.

The Cerebus project is an attempt to extend parallelreactive architectures to higher-level cognitive tasks.

An abstract is not available.

Intro Needs-based AI is a general term for action selection based on attempting to fulfill a set of mutually competing needs. An artificial agent is modeled as having a set of conflicting motivations, such as the need to eat or sleep, and the world is modeled as full of objects that can satisfy those needs at some cost. The core of the AI is an act...