The Applied Games Group Blog : General

3 Days in Vancouver

apg — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 01:49:00 GMT

The Neural Information Processing Systems conference has just finished. There were a lot of interesting talks and posters (we spare you the entire list of talks and posters, they can be found here). The most hands-on research could be seen in the demonstration track; a number of interesting demos included:

The Vocal Joystick
MoGo, one of the strongest 9x9 Go programs as of today

Also, there was a short presentation on the NetFlix prize. This is a prize sponsored by NetFlix Inc. given to the team that develops the strongest movie recommendation system. A very interesting contest!

We were very happy to have an opportunity to talk about TrueSkill during a 20 minute presentation on Tuesday. The talk went well and there were a number of questions (a lot of questions were actually ask about our current work of applying TrueSkill to 200 years of professional Chess outcome data). However, talking at such a big venue is quite a nerve wrecking experience (there are about 700 of the best researchers in AI and machine learning in the audience) and you can see a very tense Ralf right before the talk.

Ralf Herbrich and Thore Graepel

Reward Driven Racing in Cambridge

apg — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 09:24:00 GMT

I just completed my 12 week internship in the Applied Games Group. I was working with Ralf, Thore and Phil on applying model-based reinforcement learning to race car driving. This is one of the most interesting projects I've worked on. Next to my workstation I had an XBox 360 development kit hooked up to a wide screen television, which gave some of the other interns at Microsoft Research the impression that I was just playing video games all day. While I did play quite a bit, the point of my work was to get the cars in Project Gotham Racing 3 to learn to drive themselves through experience.

I implemented a simplified version of the Adaptive Modeling and Planning System (AMPS) described in my Ph.D. thesis (available here). We found that AMPS learns to drive competently after a single training lap, but the other standard algorithms that I implemented did not perform nearly as well. The strength of AMPS is partly due to its ability to generalize from limited experience through dynamic state abstraction. Currently, most racing games on the market include AI opponents with hard-coded behavior, but I think that opponents that are able to learn and adapt to your driving style and exploit your personal weaknesses can make for some very interesting gameplay.

I would recommend applying for an internship here to any Ph.D. candidate with a passion for games. The projects are fascinating, and the people here are brilliant, coming from all over the world. The atmosphere at Microsoft Research is laid back but intense at the same time, which is exactly what I was looking for in an internship. If anyone has any questions about what it is like to be an intern at MSRC, my current contact information is available on my personal website.

Mykel Kochenderfer

First Halo 3 Multiplayer Details Emerge!

apg — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:51:00 GMT

I am a big fan of Halo and Halo 2 so I was very pleased to see several gaming pages starting to report details of the Halo 3 multiplayer (originally printed in a Swedish gaming magazine). The "man-cannon" and the "Moongoose" sound like amazing fun! And, the Assault Rifle of Halo CE seems to be back: Hoorahh!

Well, it will still be some time until the game is released so in the meantime I will go back to play Splinter Cell: Double Agent. I am a fan of this series since its first incarnation and have played the story of every title (Splinter Cell 1/Pandorra Tomorrow/Chaos Theory) - I just finished the Shanghai level on Double Agent. I really like the "NSA/JBA trust bars" and think that it adds a great deal of "non"-linearity to the gameplay (at least for me). However, on the multiplayer side, I am disappointed to see SC:DA using an experienced based ranking system rather than TrueSkill. Well, I will give it a shot tonight and report on my findings.

Ralf Herbrich

Meeting the Press: Gaming with Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton

apg — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:01:00 GMT

Yesterday, we had some prominent visitors: Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton of PTS-TV. PTS-TV is a UK project to connect with the tens of thousands of Microsoft Partners in a new way (inspired by Channel 9).

Katie and Steve interviewed both Thore and me about our work on TrueSkill for almost an hour - in the end, we even got to play a race of PGR 3 and one Slayer match of Halo 2 against each other!* Everything has been captured on video and I hope not all of this action falls victim to the eventual cutting** - Thore really showed off his amazing skill with the Plasma Pistol/Battle Rifle combination (also known as the "Noob combo") and I scored a memorable hit with the Sniper Rifle.

It was a shame that we could not get Xbox Live to work in order to demonstrate TrueSkill "in action" - we had just returned from Redmond on Saturday and completely forgot to reset the network settings of our Xbox 360 (and being filmed while trying to reset the network connections does not really help to remember).

Nevertheless, we had a really great and enjoyable time with both of them - and by the look of it, they enjoyed the time as well.

Ralf Herbrich

*The race was in Tokyo, 1 lap which I won by comfortable 11 seconds. The shoot-out was 8 minutes or first to 15 kills on Lockout - Thore won this one with a comfortable lead.

**I do hope that Steve cuts out "why" we like to play competitively on Xbox Live - if not, I am in trouble ...

All the Hot News Directly from Microsoft Research Cambridge

apg — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:01:00 GMT

Welcome to our blog! We are the Applied Games group at Microsoft Research Ltd, Cambridge, UK, and this place will be used by all our team members to post about our day-to-day work. Posts will range from machine learning, video gaming to software development, including news about our favourite programming language F#.

Some of us already have individual blogs (for example, here and here) but we never get enough time individually to post a sufficient amount of content - hence the idea to bundle our time and effort and provide a vivid stream of posts on this one blog. Let's hope it works.

Ralf Herbrich & Thore Graepel