Automatic Critical Mechanic Discovery Using Playtraces in Video Games [article]

Michael Cerny Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Gabriella A.B. Barros, Tiago Machado, Julian Togelius
2020 arXiv   pre-print
We present a new method of automatic critical mechanic discovery for video games using a combination of game description parsing and playtrace information. This method is applied to several games within the General Video Game Artificial Intelligence (GVG-AI) framework. In a user study, human-identified mechanics are compared against system-identified critical mechanics to verify alignment between humans and the system. The results of the study demonstrate that the new method is able to match
more » ... ans with higher consistency than baseline. Our system is further validated by comparing MCTS agents augmented with critical mechanics and vanilla MCTS agents on 4 games from GVG-AI. Our new playtrace method shows a significant performance improvement over the baseline for all 4 tested games. The proposed method also shows either matched or improved performance over the old method, demonstrating that playtrace information is responsible for more complete critical mechanic discovery.
arXiv:1909.03094v3 fatcat:hkjyo5mmsre5zawrgy53lsd4si