World series of video games on CBS

This weekend CBS will air the first of four shows on the World Series of Video Games sponsored in part by Intel. The New York Times has an article, Video Game Matches to Be Televised on CBS that has a good overview.

“The magic of television has already transformed everything from motorcycle acrobatics to poker into living-room spectator sports, not to mention turning competitive singing into a national obsession. Next on the list: video games. Tomorrow at noon, CBS, the august home of the Masters and March Madness, will become the first broadcast network in the United States to cover a video game tournament as a sporting event.”

Posted in Contests, Events, News | No Comments »

Humans win first Man-Machine Poker Championship

This week the anual conference for the Association for the Advancement Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) hosted the First Man-Machine Poker Championship. A poker-playing computer program developed by researchers from the University of Alberta challenged two top-level poker professionals in a controlled scientific experiment with $50,000 of real money on the line. The game? Texas Hold ‘Em heads-up limit poker.

“The competition will consist of four 500-hand duplicate matches. In each duplicate match, the same series of cards will be dealt in two parallel Man versus Machine matches, with teammates playing the opposite hands in each game. At the end of the match, the total number of chips won or lost by each team is added together to determine the winning team. This format is used to reduce the element of random luck to a minimum, and get a much better indication of the differences in skill.

The human team of Phil Laak and Ali Eslami won two rounds out of three and hence the match.

Here’s the kickoff introduction by Jonathan Schaeffer from the University of Alberta and a post match interview with Phil and Ali

You can also read John Markoff’s story in the times, In Poker Match Against a Machine, Humans Are Better Bluffers. Ironically, that story appeared in the Times’ business section.

Posted in AI, technology | No Comments »

Brazilian gang kidnaps gamer to get password

A gang in Brazil kidnapped one of the top players of GunBound,a MMOG out of South Korea. Gizmodo reports:

“An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world’s top RPG gamers after one criminal’s girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google’s social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim’s head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better. …”

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Nintendo’s Wii Fit fits a new age

I noticed a slashdot post on The New Entertainment: Where Wii Fits In, an essay on Angry-Gamer.net discussing Nintendo’s new direction. It’s worth reading.

“Games like Wii Sports and Brain Age have revived classic arcade gaming. These are games intended for social groups of everyday people enticed by the experience, not for a rabid base of online strangers who just want to gank each other. The games have no first acts to set up a long storyline, no cutscenes, and no mythology or panoply of characters to wrap your head around. The only tale they tell is that of the player’s performance. The experience itself is a series of quick and simple challenges, easily attempted by anyone. Remember when Super Mario Bros. came out, and it seemed like everyone and his grandma was playing it? Well, guess what? It’s happening all over again. This is what Nintendo does. This is what it has always done. Complaining that this new phase of their plan has stopped us from sitting on our asses and twiddling our thumbs while we send our conscious minds into some fantasy land seems a little immature, and overly conservative.”

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Checkers is a solved game

An article in Science by Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues at the University of Alberta claims to have proven that checkers is a solved game — perfect play by both players will result in a draw. This is an amazing result!

“The game of checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5 x 1020). The task of solving the game, determining the final result in a game with no mistakes made by either player, is daunting. Since 1989, almost continuously, dozens of computers have been working on solving checkers, applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to the proving process. This paper announces that checkers is now solved: perfect play by both sides leads to a draw. This is the most challenging popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times more complex than Connect Four. Artificial intelligence technology has been used to generate strong heuristic-based game-playing programs, such as DEEP BLUE for chess. Solving a game takes this to the next level, by replacing the heuristics with perfection.”

Access to the article requires a subscription, but you can access some online material for free. Better yet, you can see a video and 95 minute podcast of Schaeffer describing the Chinook program how they proved that checkers is a draw game. Amazingly, Shaeffer says that his programs that have been exploring the checkers game tree have been running, off and on, for eighteen years! Also, check out the article Computer Checkers Program Is Invincible in today’s New York Times.

Can you play a perfect game? To find out, you can try the Chinook program on-line.

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From MUDs to Worlds of Warcraft, is it progress?

Today’s massively multiplayer games and environments like Worlds of Warcraft and Secod Life have their roots in MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) popular in the 80s and 90s. The Guardian’s games blog has an interview with Richard Bartle, co-creator of the original MUD in 1978 at the University of Essex.

The post’s title is a provocative quote from Bartle, “I’d close World of Warcraft!” MUD creator Richard Bartle on the state of virtual worlds.

Note: You can try out a version on MUD2, Bartle’s successor to the original MUD here.

Posted in History, MMOGs | No Comments »

Security and games: exploiting online games

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft and Second Life are large, complex, dynamic distributed software systems with hundreds of thousands of users scattered around the world. A new book, Exploiting Online Games explores a range of security issues associated with these games, including topics like the following.

• Why online games are a harbinger of software security issues to come
• How millions of gamers have created billion-dollar virtual economies
• How game companies invade personal privacy
• Why some gamers cheat
• Techniques for breaking online game security
• How to build a bot to play a game for you
• Methods for total conversion and advanced mods

Tim Wilson of Dark Reading motivated it this way in his post about the book

“You’re playing an online game in which players are warriors who can only walk, jump, or run. Suddenly, another player appears out of nowhere, draws his sword, and hacks you to bits. Game over. But were you really beaten by a superior player? Or did a hacker or cheater simply rig the game?”

This book illustrates a theme that underlies the game track in the CMSC program. Studying computer games is a good way to learn the basic principles of computer science and studying computer science is a good way to prepare yourself for a career in the interactive entertainment industry.

Posted in CS, Careers, MMOGs, technology, virtual worlds | No Comments »

Women In Games International

Women In Games International is an organization that promotes the role of women in the game industry. It was founded in 2005 in response to a growing demand around the world for the inclusion and advancement of women in the game industry.

WIGI’s activites include research, education and sponsoring conferences, workshops, seminars and other events that help women break into and succeed in the game industry. Check out their resources page for information on their LinkedIn networking group, Google mentoring group, online career center, and scholarship information.

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Xbox Red Ring of Death to cost Microsoft $1.15B

The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft will spend up to $1.15 billion to repair failing Xbox 360 game machine consoles.

“The company declined to explain the nature of the failure, but said that it was not caused by a single problem in the console, which it said contained 1,700 components and 500 million transistors. The company also said there were no health or safety concerns involved. The problem began to appear over the last three to four months, Mr. Bach said, after “significant usage” of the consoles. He said the company has taken steps to correct the problem in new devices. Microsoft said it would extend the warranty of the game console to three years to customers worldwide. Previously, products sold in the United States were covered by a one-year warranty, while Xbox 360 units sold in Europe had a two-year warranty.”

Microsoft has sold over 11 million Xbox systems. Some estimate that between one third and one half of these suffer the flaw that results in the red ring of death symptom.

Posted in xbox | 3 Comments »

A science of games

The current issue of the Communications of the ACM (v50n7) is a special issue on Creating a science of games. The introduction and siX articles will be of special interests to computer scientists.

“The time has come to take computer games seriously, really seriously, says Michael Zyda, professor of engineering practice at the University of Southern California where he is director of the USC GamePipe Laboratory. … The authors share their latest research and vision toward this goal. All contend that future research, innovation, and creativity in education and training will demand the skills and knowledge of computer scientists, not just game developers, many of whom are still reeling from early attempts at edutainment. The potential for revolutionizing math and science education using a game-based learning infrastructure is immeasurable and will happen, Zyda says, only via the efforts of computer scientists and the realization that educational programs must produce graduates able to create next-generation game technologies

Articles in ACM’s digital library should be available if you access them from a computer on the UMBC network or if you establish a VPN connection to UMBC from your off campus computer. (Note — you might try the new OIT web based VPN system).

Here are the articles…

• Creating a Science of Games, Michael Zyda, Guest Editor, (pdf)
• Games for Science and Engineering Education, Merrilea J. Mayo, (pdf)
• Games for Training, Ralph E. Chatham. (pdf)
• How to Build Serious Games, Henry Kelly, Kay Howell, Eitan Glinert, Loring Holding, Chris Swain, Adam Burrowbridge, and Michelle Roper. (pdf)
• Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center: Combining the Left and Right Brain, Randy Pausch and Don Marinelli. (pdf)
• Using Storytelling to Motivate Programming, Caitlin Kelleher and Randy Pausch. (pdf)
• Real-Time Sound Synthesis and Propagation for Games, Nikunj Raghuvanshi, Christian Lauterbach, Anish Chandak, Dinesh Manocha, and Ming C. Li. (pdf)

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