Reinforced Evolutionary Algorithms for Game Difficulty Control

Abstract

In the field of game designing, artificial intelligence is used to generate responsive, adaptive, or intelligent behaviors primarily in Non-Player-Characters (NPCs). There is a large demand for controlling game AI since a variety of players expect to be provided NPC opponents with appropriate difficulties to improve their game experience. However, to the best of our knowledge, a few works are focusing on this problem. In this paper, we firstly present a Reinforced Evolutionary Algorithm based on the Difficulty-Difference objective (REA-DD) to the DLAI problem, which combines reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms. REA-DD is able to generate the desired difficulty level of game AI accurately. Nonetheless, REA can only obtain a kind of game AI in each run. To improve efficiency, another algorithm based on Multi-objective Optimization is proposed, regarded as RMOEA-DD, which obtains DLAI after one run. Experiments on the game Pong from ALE and apply on a commercial game named The Ghost Story to show that our algorithms provide valid methods to the DLAI problem both in the term of controlling accuracy and efficiency.