Runtime Behavior Adaptation for Real-Time Interactive Games

Intelligent agents working in real-time domains need to adapt to changing circumstance so that they can improve their performance and avoid their mistakes. AI agents designed for interactive games, however, typically lack this ability. Game agents are traditionally implemented using static, hand-authored behaviors or scripts that are brittle to changing world dynamics and cause a break in player experience when they repeatedly fail. Furthermore, their static nature causes a lot of effort for the game designers as they have to think of all imaginable circumstances that can be encountered by the agent. The problem is exacerbated as state-of-the-art computer games have huge decision spaces, interactive users, and real-time performance that make the problem of creating AI approaches for these domains harder. In this paper, we address the issue of nonadaptivity of game playing agents in complex real-time domains. The agents carry out runtime adaptation of their behavior sets by monitoring and reasoning about their behavior execution to dynamically carry out revisions on the behaviors. The behavior adaptation approaches have been instantiated in two real-time interactive game domains. The evaluation results show that the agents in the two domains successfully adapt themselves by revising their behavior sets appropriately.