An Industry/Academia Research Network on Artificial Intelligence and Games Technologies

当我们完成这份拨款提案时，有突发新闻称，游戏行业的代表重新开始游说创意产业部长玛格丽特·霍奇，要求政府继续支持视频游戏行业。虽然英国游戏产业目前很强大，但人们普遍认为，它可能会遭受与英国电影业相同的命运，并失去其作为世界第三大玩家的地位。保持其强势地位的一个重要方法是游戏行业利用大学计算研究实验室的丰富知识。这样的合作将带来双重好处，因为计算研究人员总是在寻找研究问题，以扩展他们对计算世界的理解，并使他们能够产生通用的软件和硬件解决方案。不幸的是，学术界与游戏公司合作的速度很慢。特别是，虽然EPSRC资助的项目中有40%与行业合作，但只有20%涉及游戏和数字媒体的项目是如此。我们建议改变这一状况，将学术界和游戏行业的专业人士聚集在一起，交流想法，问题和观点，并最终导致特定游戏相关主题的研究资助提案正在编写中。我们建议专注于人工智能（AI）计算子领域。需要有这样一个重点，以便缩小审议中的专题范围，并鼓励富有成效的合作。我们对AI的关注有两个原因：1。视频游戏中的人工智能表现一直是游戏的一个重要方面，最近被描绘为游戏的下一个主要市场差异化因素。事实上，人工智能已经被用作一种营销工具，许多下一代游戏都是以增强的智能来规划的。此外，随着游戏世界变得越来越大和复杂，许多游戏工作室越来越多地使用人工智能技术来帮助他们更有效地设计产品。2.从人工智能的早期开始，游戏就一直是新想法的重要试验平台。事实上，视频游戏已经被许多AI研究人员提议为AI研究的杀手级应用程序。这是因为（i）让游戏角色智能地行动并提供真实的交互对AI研究来说是一个非常困难的问题，帮助构建游戏世界的问题也是如此（ii）游戏环境为实验智能技术提供了一个独特的机会-不仅是丰富的3 D环境，而且如果游戏要可信，游戏角色的智能行为是必不可少的，并且玩家和开发者可以即时反馈;（iii）由于目前游戏中的大多数智能行为很少或根本没有使用复杂的AI技术，因此还有很大的改进空间。我们提出的网络除了LDA和TIGA（游戏行业贸易协会）的支持外，还得到了8家游戏公司的书面支持和另外6家公司的口头支持。我们还选择了24位学者作为最初的网络成员，并获得了他们的支持。为了将这些各方聚集在一起，我们计划每年举办一系列网络级活动和三个子组活动（重点关注AI：化身，非玩家角色和游戏设计）。我们还旨在鼓励游戏行业专业人士和人工智能学者之间的互访。我们将通过一个网站、邮寄名单和季度通讯，使网络成员充分了解事态发展。我们的目标不仅是将AI/游戏世界中感兴趣的各方聚集在一起，而且还将塑造与游戏相关的AI研究的未来。为此，我们将编写一份路线图文件并广泛分发，此外，我们将大力鼓励网络成员合作向资助机构提交研究提案。

As we finished writing this grant proposal, there was breaking news that games industry representatives had renewed their lobbying of Margaret Hodge, Minister for Creative Industries, for continued governmental support of the video games industry. While the UK games industry is strong at the moment, it is widely appreciated that it could suffer the same fate as the UK film industry, and lose its position as the third largest player in the world. An important way to maintain its strong position is for the games industry to tap into the wealth of knowledge in University computing research laboratories. There would be a double benefit to such a collaboration, as computing researchers are always looking for research problems to stretch their understanding of the computing world, and to enable them to produce general purpose software and hardware solutions.Unfortunately, academics have been slow to collaborate with games companies. In particular, while 40% of EPSRC funded projects have an industry collaboration, this is true of only 20% of those projects involving games and digital media. We propose to change this position by bringing together a network of academics and games industry professionals to exchange ideas, problems and outlooks, and ultimately to lead to research grant proposals on particular games-related topics being written.We propose to focus on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sub-area of computing. Such a focus is needed in order to narrow down the topics under consideration, and to encourage fruitful collaboration. Our focus on AI is justified for two reasons:1. The manifestation of artificial intelligences inside video games has always been an important aspect of games, and has recently been portrayed as the next major market differentiator for games. Indeed, AI is already used as a marketing tool, and many next generation games are planned with enhanced intelligence. Moreover, as game worlds are increasingly large and complex, many games studios are increasingly using AI techniques to help them more efficiently design their products. 2. Since the earliest days of AI, games have been an important testbed for new ideas. Indeed, video games have been proposed by many AI researchers as the Killer App for AI research. This is because (i) getting game characters to act intelligently and provide real interaction is a very difficult problem for AI research, as is the problem of helping build game worlds (ii) game environments provide a unique opportunity for experimenting with intellligent techniques - not only is it a rich 3D environment, but intelligent behaviour of game characters is imperative if a game is to be believable, and there is instant feedback from players and developers, and (iii) there is much room for improvement, as most intelligent behaviour in games currently uses little or no sophisticated AI techniques.The network we propose has the written support of eight games companies, and the verbal support of a further six, in addition to LDA and TIGA (the games industry trade association) support. We also have selected and gained the support of 24 academics to act as the initial network members. In order to bring these parties together, we plan a series of network-level events and three subgroup events per year (focussed on AI for: avatars, non-player characters and game design). We also aim to encourage exchange visits between games industry professionals and AI academics. We will keep the network members fully appraised of developments with a website, mailing list and quarterly newsletter. We aim not only to bring together interested parties in the AI/game world, but also to shape the future of AI research related to games. To do this, we will produce a road map document and widely circulate it. Moreover, we will strongly encourage network members to collaborate on the submission of research proposals to the funding agencies.