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Theses and Dissertations
This collection contains theses and dissertations of graduate students of the University of Alberta. The collection contains a very large number of theses electronically available that were granted from 1947 to 2009, 90% of theses granted from 2009-2014, and 100% of theses granted from April 2014 to the present (as long as the theses are not under temporary embargo by agreement with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies). IMPORTANT NOTE: To conduct a comprehensive search of all UofA theses granted and in University of Alberta Libraries collections, search the library catalogue at www.library.ualberta.ca - you may search by Author, Title, Keyword, or search by Department.
To retrieve all theses and dissertations associated with a specific department from the library catalogue, choose 'Advanced' and keyword search "university of alberta dept of english" OR "university of alberta department of english" (for example). Past graduates who wish to have their thesis or dissertation added to this collection can contact us at erahelp@ualberta.ca.
Items in this Collection
- 1Ahmad, Zaheen F
- 1Burch, Neil
- 1Daliri,Mohammadreza
- 1Desai, Neesha J
- 1Ewalds, Timo V
- 1Henderson, Philip
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Fall 2024
Video game development is a highly technical practice that traditionally requires programming skills. This serves as a barrier to entry for would-be developers or those hoping to use games as part of their creative expression. While there have been prior game development tools focused on...
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Action Selection for Hammer Shots in Curling: Optimization of Non-convex Continuous Actions With Stochastic Action Outcomes
DownloadSpring 2017
Optimal decision making in the face of uncertainty is an active area of research in artificial intelligence. In this thesis, I present the sport of curling as a novel application domain for research in optimal decision making. I focus on one aspect of the sport, the hammer shot, the last shot...
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Spring 2015
Believable, realistic video game character behaviour continues to lag behind the improvements in graphics, stories and game play in video games. In this dissertation we focus on the use of two techniques, emotional gaits and emotional incidents, as a way to add easily identifiable, non-verbal,...
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Spring 2011
With the rise of services like Steam and Xbox Live, multiplayer support has become essential to the success of many commercial video games. Explicit, server-client synchronisation models are bandwidth intensive and error prone to implement, while implicit, peer-to-peer synchronisation models are...
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Fall 2022
OpenSpiel is an open-source software system for implementing high-performance software players for many different computer games. Hex is a two-player game of perfect information used in a variety of computer games research projects. The OpenSpiel project has implemented a version of the AlphaZero...
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Spring 2010
This research focuses on developing AI agents that play arbitrary Atari 2600 console games without having any game-specific assumptions or prior knowledge. Two main approaches are considered: reinforcement learning based methods and search based methods. The RL-based methods use feature vectors...
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Spring 2019
Current state-of-the-art algorithms for trick-taking card games use a process called determinization. Determinization is a technique that allows the application of perfect information state evaluation algorithms to imperfect information games. It involves a two-step process in which a perfect...
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Leveraging Large Language Models for Speeding Up Local Search Algorithms for Computing Programmatic Best Responses
DownloadFall 2024
Despite having advantages such as generalizability and interpretability over neural representations, programmatic representations of hypotheses and strategies face significant challenges. This is because algorithms writing programs encoding hypotheses for solving supervised learning problems and...
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Spring 2012
Havannah is a recent game that is interesting from an AI research perspective. Some of its properties, including virtual connections, frames, dead cells, draws and races to win, are explained. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is well suited to play Havannah, but many improvements are possible....