Skip to main content

Evolving Behaviour Trees for the Mario AI Competition Using Grammatical Evolution

  • Conference paper
Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6624))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This paper investigates the applicability of Genetic Programming type systems to dynamic game environments. Grammatical Evolution was used to evolved Behaviour Trees, in order to create controllers for the Mario AI Benchmark. The results obtained reinforce the applicability of evolutionary programming systems to the development of artificial intelligence in games, and in dynamic systems in general, illustrating their viability as an alternative to more standard AI techniques.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Angeline, P.: Subtree Crossover: Building Block Engine or Macromutation? In: Proceedings of Genetic Programming 1997, pp. 9–17. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Champandard, A., Dawe, M., Cerpa, D.H.: Behavior Trees: Three Ways of Cultivating Strong AI. In: Game Developers Conference, Audio Lecture (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Champandard, A.: Behavior Trees for Next-Gen Game AI. In: Game Developers Conference, Audio Lecture (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Colvin, R., Hayes, I.J.: A Semantics for Behavior Trees. ARC Centre for Complex Systems. Tech. report ACCS-TR-07-01 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Goldberg, D.E.: Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1989)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  6. Isla, D.: Managing Complexity in the Halo 2 AI System. In: Proceedings of Game Developers Conference (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Koza, J.R.: Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection. MIT Press, Cambridge (1992)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Lim, C., Baumgarten, R., Colton, S.: Evolving Behaviour Trees for the Commercial Game DEFCON. In: Proceedings of Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoStar 2010 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  9. McKay, R.I., Nguyen, X.H., Whigham, P.A., Shan, Y., O’Neill, M.: Grammar-Based Genetic Programming - A Survey. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines 11(3-4), 365–396 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. McHugh, L.: Three Approaches to Behavior Tree AI. In: Proceedings of Game Developers Conference (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Mora, A.M., Montoya, R., Merelo, J.J., Sánchez, P.G., Castillo, P.A., Laredo, J.L.J., Martínez, A.I., Espacia, A.: Evolving Bot AI in Unreal. In: Proceedings of Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoStar 2010 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Mateas, M., Stern, A.: Managing Intermixing Behavior Hierarchies. In: Proceedings of Game Developers Conference (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Nicolau, M., Dempsey, I.: Introducing Grammar Based Extensions for Grammatical Evolution. In: Proceedings of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, pp. 2663–2670. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Nilsson, N.J.: Artificial Intelligence, A New Synthesis. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (1998)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Nason, S., Laird, J.: Soar-RL: Integrating Reinforcement Learning with Soar. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Cognitive Modelling (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  16. O’Neill, M., Ryan, C.: Grammatical Evolution: Evolutionary Automatic Programming in a Arbitrary Language. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2003)

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  17. Priesterjahn, S.: Imitation-Based Evolution of Artificial Game Players. ACM Sigevolution 2(4), 2–13 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Ryan, C., Azad, R.M.A.: Sensible initialisation in grammatical evolution. In: Barry, A.M. (ed.) GECCO 2003: Proceedings of the Bird of a Feather Workshops, pp. 142–145. AAAI, Menlo Park (July 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Sastry, K., O’Reilly, U., Goldberg, D.E., Hill, D.: Building Block Supply in Genetic Programming. In: Genetic Programming Theory and Practice, ch. 4, pp. 137–154. Kluwer Publishers, Dordrecht (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Thurau, C., Bauckhauge, C., Sagerer, G.: Combining Self Organizing Maps and Multiplayer Perceptrons to Learn Bot-Behavior for a Comercial Game. In: Proceedings of GAME-ON 2003 Conference (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Togelius, J., Karakovskiy, S., Baumgarten, R.: The 2009 Mario AI Competition. In: Proceedings of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Togelius, J., Karakovskiy, S., Koutnik, J., Schmidhuber, J.: Super Mario Evolution. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2009)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Perez, D., Nicolau, M., O’Neill, M., Brabazon, A. (2011). Evolving Behaviour Trees for the Mario AI Competition Using Grammatical Evolution. In: Di Chio, C., et al. Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6624. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20525-5_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20525-5_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20524-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20525-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics