AntBot: Ant Colonies for Video Games

Abstract

The video game industry is an emerging market which continues to expand. From its early beginning, developers have focused mainly on sound and graphical applications, paying less attention to developing game bots or other kinds of nonplayer characters (NPCs). However, recent advances in artificial intelligence offer the possibility of developing game bots which are dynamically adjustable to several difficulty levels as well as variable game environments. Previous works reveal a lack of swarm intelligence approaches to develop these kinds of agents. Considering the potential of particle swarm optimization due to its emerging properties and self-adaptation to dynamic environments, further investigation into this field must be undertaken. This research focuses on developing a generic framework based on swarm intelligence, and in particular on ant colony optimization, such as it allows general implementation of real-time bots that work over dynamic game environments. The framework has been adapted to allow the implementation of intelligent agents for the classical game Ms. Pac-Man. These were trialed at the Ms. Pac-Man competitions held during the 2011 International Congress on Evolutionary Computation.