PhD students working on the ultimate StarCraft bot

Can an artificial intelligence play StarCraft like a professional player? That's what UC Santa Cruz students Ben Weber and Peter Mawhorter set out to test when they began their latest project at the university's Expressive Intelligence Studio. Working with their associate professor, the noted interactive drama pioneer Michael Mateas, they are participating in the studio’s broader goal of exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, art, and design. According to Mateas, "our goal is to create compelling new forms of interactive art and entertainment that provide more deeply autonomous, generative and dynamic responses to interaction. A major thrust of this work is advanced A.I. for video games, including autonomous characters and interactive storytelling. By viewing A.I. as an expressive medium, our work raises and answers novel A.I. research questions while pushing the boundaries of the conceivable and possible in interactive experiences. Current projects in the group include automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling."