Colloquium
"Scaling Computer Games to Epic Proportions"
Walker White, Cornell University
Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 4:00 P.M.
Room 368 (CIT 3rd Floor)
An important aspect of computer games is the artificial intelligence (AI) of non-player characters. To create interesting AI in games today, developers or players can create complex, dynamic behavior for a very small number of characters, but neither the game engines nor the style of AI programming enables intelligent behavior that scales to a very large number of non-player characters.
In this talk, I will present a first step towards truly scalable AI in computer games, by modeling game AI as a data management problem. The presentation includes a highly expressive scripting language SGL (for Scalable Gaming Language) that provides game designers and players with a data-driven AI scheme for customizing behavior for individual non-player characters. The use sophisticated query processing and indexing techniques allows us to efficiently execute large numbers of SGL scripts, thus providing a framework for games with a truly epic number of non-player characters.
This talk describes joint work with Alan Demers, Johannes Gehrke, and Christoph Koch, all of Cornell.
BIO
Walker White is a research associate in the computer science department at Cornell University. He is a member of the Cornell database group, where his research focuses on the design and implementation of query languages. Recently, he has been working to bring research issues from the field of computer games to the database community. Dr. White has extensive experience with computer games, as a player and a modder, as well as having worked with members of industry to develop games-related curriculum. He is the advisor to the Games Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC), through which he teaches the introductory course in game design.
Host: Shriram Krishnamurthi
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