We share our modern world with bots – chatbots to converse with, roombots to clean our houses, spambots to fill our e-mail inboxes, and medibots to assist our surgeons. This book is about computer game bots, virtual companions who accompany us in virtual worlds or sharpen our fighting skills. These bots must be believable, that is human players should believe they are interacting with entities operating at a human level – bots are more fun if they behave like we do. This book shows how to create believable bots that play computer games, and it discusses the implications of making them appear human. The chapters in this book present the state of the art in research on and development of game bots, and they also look beyond the design aspects to address deep questions: Is a bot that plays like a person intelligent? Does it have emotions? Is it conscious? The topic is inherently interdisciplinary, and the work draws from research and practice in many fields, such as design, creativity, entertainment, and graphics; learning, psychology, and sociology; artificial intelligence, embodiment, agents, machine learning, robotics, human–computer interaction, and artificial life; cognition and neuroscience; and evolutionary computing. The contributing authors are among the leading researchers and developers in this field, and most of the examples and case studies involve analysis of commercial products. The book will be of value to graduate students and academic researchers in artificial intelligence, and to engineers charged with the design of entertaining games.

We share our modern world with bots – chatbots to converse with, roombots to clean our houses, spambots to fill our e-mail inboxes, and medibots to assist our surgeons. This book is about computer game bots, virtual companions who accompany us in virtual worlds or sharpen our fighting skills. These bots must be believable, that is human players should believe they are interacting with entities operating at a human level – bots are more fun if they behave like we do. This book shows how to create believable bots that play computer games, and it discusses the implications of making them appear human. The chapters in this book present the state of the art in research on and development of game bots, and they also look beyond the design aspects to address deep questions: Is a bot that plays like a person intelligent? Does it have emotions? Is it conscious? The topic is inherently interdisciplinary, and the work draws from research and practice in many fields, such as design, creativity, entertainment, and graphics; learning, psychology, and sociology; artificial intelligence, embodiment, agents, machine learning, robotics, human–computer interaction, and artificial life; cognition and neuroscience; and evolutionary computing. The contributing authors are among the leading researchers and developers in this field, and most of the examples and case studies involve analysis of commercial products. The book will be of value to graduate students and academic researchers in artificial intelligence, and to engineers charged with the design of entertaining games.

This two-volume set LNCS 10305 and LNCS 10306 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, IWANN 2017, held in Cadiz, Spain, in June 2017. The 126 revised full papers presented in this double volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 199 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Bio-inspired Computing; E-Health and Computational Biology; Human Computer Interaction; Image and Signal Processing; Mathematics for Neural Networks; Self-organizing Networks; Spiking Neurons; Artificial Neural Networks in Industry ANNI'17; Computational Intelligence Tools and Techniques for Biomedical Applications; Assistive Rehabilitation Technology; Computational Intelligence Methods for Time Series; Machine Learning Applied to Vision and Robotics; Human Activity Recognition for Health and Well-Being Applications; Software Testing and Intelligent Systems; Real World Applications of BCI Systems; Machine Learning in Imbalanced Domains; Surveillance and Rescue Systems and Algorithms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles; End-User Development for Social Robotics; Artificial Intelligence and Games; and Supervised, Non-Supervised, Reinforcement and Statistical Algorithms.

While today's game engines and multi-agent platforms cross-fertilize each other to some extent, the technologies used in these areas are not readily compatible due to some differences in their primary concerns. Where game engines prioritize efficiency and central control, multi-agent platforms focus on agent autonomy and sophisticated communication capabilities. This volume gives an overview of the current state of the art for people wishing to combine agent technology with (serious) games. This state-of-the-art survey contains a collection of papers presented at AGS 2010; the Second International Workshop on Agents for Games and Simulations, held on May 10, 2010, in Toronto, as well as extended versions of papers from other workshops and from the AAMAS conference. The 14 papers are organized in three topical sections focusing on architectures combining agents and game engines, on the training aspects of the games, on social and organizational aspects of games and agents, respectively.

The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind requires that we better understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive and learning functions. In recent years, biologically inspired cognitive architectures have emerged as a powerful new approach toward gaining this kind of understanding (here “biologically inspired” is understood broadly as “brain-mind inspired”). Still, despite impressive successes and growing interest in BICA, wide gaps separate different approaches from each other and from solutions found in biology. Modern scientific societies pursue related yet separate goals, while the mission of the BICA Society consists in the integration of many efforts in addressing the above challenge. Therefore, the BICA Society shall bring together researchers from disjointed fields and communities who devote their efforts to solving the same challenge, despite that they may “speak different languages”. This will be achieved by promoting and facilitating the transdisciplinary study of cognitive architectures, and in the long-term perspective – creating one unifying widespread framework for the human-level cognitive architectures and their implementations. This book is a proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the BICA Society, which was hold in Palermo-Italy from October 31 to November 2, 2012. The book describes recent advances and new challenges around the theme of understanding how to create general-purpose humanlike artificial intelligence using inspirations from studies of the brain and the mind.

The advancement of information technology is becoming more prevalent in all aspects of the world today, including online environments. Understanding technology’s effect on niche markets and all fields of research is crucial for practitioners in this area. Contemporary Advancements in Information Technology Development in Dynamic Environments presents an in-depth discussion into the information technology revolution present in fields such as government, gaming, social networking, and cloud computing. This book’s investigation into the research and application of information technology in several specific areas make this a useful resource for practitioners, professionals, undergraduate/graduate students, and academics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2018, held at the 24th IFIP World Computer Congress, WCC 2018, in Poznan, Poland, in September 2018. The 15 full papers, 13 short papers, and 23 poster, demostration, and workshop papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. They cover a large range of topics in the following thematic areas: digital games and interactive entertainment; design, human-computer interaction, and analysis of entertainment systems; interactive art, performance and cultural computing; entertainment devices, platforms and systems; theoratical foundations and ethical issues; entertainment for purpose and persuasion; computational methodologies for entertainment; and media studies, communication, business, and information systems.