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Spring 2024

Abutarab, Faisal U. R.

In this thesis, we discuss the video game design concept of orthogonality and provide its operationalization. Our focus is on combinatorial puzzle games---puzzle games in which each puzzle, i.e. level, is composed of object types that are reused across puzzles. For example, in the puzzle game...

Spring 2024

Mohammad Lavasani, Sepehr

In recent years, significant strides in optimal bidirectional heuristic search (Bi-HS) have deepened our theoretical understanding and boosted performance. Yet, algorithms for Bi-HS in unbounded suboptimal scenarios remains largely unexplored. Despite leveraging front-to-end (F2E) and...

Fall 2023

Chen, You Chen Eugene

Evaluating and ranking the difficulty and enjoyment of puzzles is important in game design. Typically, such rankings are constructed manually for each specific game, which can be time consuming, subject to designer bias, and requires extensive play testing. An approach to ranking that generalizes...

Spring 2010

KIRCI, MESUT

Domain-independent feature learning is a hard problem. This is reflected by lack of broad research in the area. The goal of General Game Playing (GGP) can be described as designing computer programs that can play a variety of games given only a logical game description. Any learning has to be...

Fall 2009

Moldenhauer, Carsten

Moving target search has been given much attention during the last twenty years. It is a game in which multiple pursuers (cops) try to catch an evading agent (robber) and also known as the game of cops and robber. Within this thesis we study a discrete alternating version played on a graph with...

Fall 2022

Li, Tianhua

Machine learning has been used to solve single-agent search problems. One of its applications is to guide search algorithms by learning heuristics. However, it is difficult to provide guarantees on the quality of learning from a neural network, since the resulting heuristics can be inadmissible,...

Fall 2023

Ray, Debraj

Real-time strategy games require players to respond to short-term challenges (micromanagement) and long-term objectives (macromanagement) simultaneously to win. However, many players excel at one of these skills but not both. This research studies whether the burden of micromanagement can be...

Fall 2011

Metcalf, Adam

Pinball is fast-paced arcade-style game of which the origins date back hundreds of years. Game playing robots exist for billiards, foosball, and soccer and each have their own unique challenges. The speed that balls move in pinball machines requires that players have quick reactions. We created...

Spring 2010

Shafiei Khadem, Mohammad

General Game Playing (GGP) deals with the design of players that are able to play any discrete, deterministic, complete information games. For many games like chess, designers develop a player using a specially designed algorithm and tune all the features of the algorithm to play the game as good...

Fall 2009

Valenzano, Richard

Many single-agent search algorithms have parameters that need to be tuned. Although settings found by offline tuning will exhibit strong average performance, properly selecting parameter settings for each problem can result in substantially reduced search effort. We consider the use of...