AI computer programme develops video game

Researchers at Imperial College London have developed an Artificially Intelligent (AI) computer program that has itself designed a video game for the Christmas season, which can be downloaded for free.

The game developed by the AI computer program is called "A Puzzling Present". In the game, Santa Claus has been sucked into a Christmas present and it is the player's goal to help Santa collect gifts in the 30 Christmas-themed lands, which are filled with deadly holly and other obstacles.

The inspiration for an AI program that could create games grew out of work at Imperial's Computational Creativity group, which aims to make computers more creative and inventive. The AI program with the tongue in cheek name of "A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named Angelina" or ANGELINA has developed eight games so far, which are all published on her own website.

Michael Cook, a PhD student from the Department of Computing, says,  "I've played videogames my whole life. I've written videogames my whole life and I am interested in how to get computers to be creative on their own. I wanted to know if you can get a computer to design video games.  In many ways she is like Photoshop or Microsoft Word but when ANGELINA starts running, instead of waiting for me to do stuff, she works on her own. Through the development of a quirky Christmas-themed computer game, ANGELINA demonstrates just how creative computers can be."

Cook has given ANGELINA the ability to be creative by enabling her to work by herself to create levels for games. She does this by harnessing the power of a technique known as 'computational evolution'.

Through computational evolution, ANGELINA mimics natural evolution. She starts this process by first creating the landscape for several 'parent' levels for the same game. To create the parent levels, ANGELINA simply scatters a few lines and boxes randomly around the space that she is working in.