Over the last decade, progress in deep learning has had a profound and transformational effect on many complex problems, including speech recognition, machine translation, natural language understanding, and computer vision. As a result, computers can now achieve human-competitive performance in a wide range of perception and recognition tasks. Many of these systems are now available to the programmer via a range of so-called cognitive services. More recently, deep reinforcement learning has achieved ground-breaking success in several complex challenges. This book makes an enormous contribution to this beautiful, vibrant area of study: an area that is developing rapidly both in breadth and depth. Deep learning can cope with a broader range of tasks (and perform those tasks to increasing levels of excellence). This book lays a good foundation for the core concepts and principles of deep learning in gaming and animation, walking you through the fundamental ideas with expert ease. This book progresses in a step-by-step manner. It reinforces theory with a full-fledged pedagogy designed to enhance students' understanding and offer them a practical insight into its applications. Also, some chapters introduce and cover novel ideas about how artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and machine learning have changed the world in gaming and animation. It gives us the idea that AI can also be applied in gaming, and there are limited textbooks in this area. This book comprehensively addresses all the aspects of AI and deep learning in gaming. Also, each chapter follows a similar structure so that students, teachers, and industry experts can orientate themselves within the text. There are few books in the field of gaming using AI. Deep Learning in Gaming and Animations teaches you how to apply the power of deep learning to build complex reasoning tasks. After being exposed to the foundations of machine and deep learning, you will use Python to build a bot and then teach it the game's rules. This book also focuses on how different technologies have revolutionized gaming and animation with various illustrations.

What is artificial intelligence? How is artificial intelligence used in game development? Game development lives in its own technical world. It has its own idioms, skills, and challenges. That’s one of the reasons games are so much fun to work on. Each game has its own rules, its own aesthetic, and its own trade-offs, and the hardware it will run on keeps changing. AI for Games is designed to help you understand one element of game development: artificial intelligence (AI).

Research on general video game playing aims at designing agents or content generators that can perform well in multiple video games, possibly without knowing the game in advance and with little to no specific domain knowledge. The general video game AI framework and competition propose a challenge in which researchers can test their favorite AI methods with a potentially infinite number of games created using the Video Game Description Language. The open-source framework has been used since 2014 for running a challenge. Competitors around the globe submit their best approaches that aim to generalize well across games. Additionally, the framework has been used in AI modules by many higher-education institutions as assignments, or as proposed projects for final year (undergraduate and Master's) students and Ph.D. candidates. The present book, written by the developers and organizers of the framework, presents the most interesting highlights of the research performed by the authors during these years in this domain. It showcases work on methods to play the games, generators of content, and video game optimization. It also outlines potential further work in an area that offers multiple research directions for the future.

THE FUTURE OF GAME DESIGN IN THE AGE OF AI: Can games measure intelligence? And how will artificial intelligence inform games of the future? In Playing Smart, Julian Togelius explores the connections between games and intelligence to offer a new vision of future games and game design. Video games already depend on AI. We use games to test AI algorithms, challenge our thinking, and better understand both natural and artificial intelligence. In the future, Togelius argues, game designers will be able to create smarter games that make us smarter in turn, applying advanced AI to help design games. In this book, he tells us how. Games are the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. In 1948, Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, handwrote a program for chess. Today we have IBM’s Deep Blue and DeepMind’s AlphaGo, and huge efforts go into developing AI that can play such arcade games as Pac-Man. Programmers continue to use games to test and develop AI, creating new benchmarks for AI while also challenging human assumptions and cognitive abilities. Game design is at heart a cognitive science, Togelius reminds us—when we play or design a game, we plan, think spatially, make predictions, move, and assess ourselves and our performance. By studying how we play and design games, Togelius writes, we can better understand how humans and machines think. AI can do more for game design than providing a skillful opponent. We can harness it to build game-playing and game-designing AI agents, enabling a new generation of AI-augmented games. With AI, we can explore new frontiers in learning and play.

Argues for the queer potential of video games While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.

The leading experts in system change and learning, with their school-based partners around the world, have created this essential companion to their runaway best-seller, Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World. This hands-on guide provides a roadmap for building capacity in teachers, schools, districts, and systems to design deep learning, measure progress, and assess conditions needed to activate and sustain innovation. Dive Into Deep Learning: Tools for Engagement is rich with resources educators need to construct and drive meaningful deep learning experiences in order to develop the kind of mindset and know-how that is crucial to becoming a problem-solving change agent in our global society. Designed in full color, this easy-to-use guide is loaded with tools, tips, protocols, and real-world examples. It includes: • A framework for deep learning that provides a pathway to develop the six global competencies needed to flourish in a complex world — character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. • Learning progressions to help educators analyze student work and measure progress. • Learning design rubrics, templates and examples for incorporating the four elements of learning design: learning partnerships, pedagogical practices, learning environments, and leveraging digital. • Conditions rubrics, teacher self-assessment tools, and planning guides to help educators build, mobilize, and sustain deep learning in schools and districts. Learn about, improve, and expand your world of learning. Put the joy back into learning for students and adults alike. Dive into deep learning to create learning experiences that give purpose, unleash student potential, and transform not only learning, but life itself.

The model-based approach for carrying out classification and identification of tasks has led to the pervading progress of the machine learning paradigm in diversified fields of technology. Deep Learning Concepts in Operations Research looks at the concepts that are the foundation of this model-based approach. Apart from the classification process, the machine learning (ML) model has become effective enough to predict future trends of any sort of phenomena. Such fields as object classification, speech recognition, and face detection have sought extensive application of artificial intelligence (AI) and ML as well. Among a variety of topics, the book examines: An overview of applications and computing devices Deep learning impacts in the field of AI Deep learning as state-of-the-art approach to AI Exploring deep learning architecture for cutting-edge AI solutions Operations research is the branch of mathematics for performing many operational tasks in other allied domains, and the book explains how the implementation of automated strategies in optimization and parameter selection can be carried out by AI and ML. Operations research has many beneficial aspects for decision making. Discussing how a proper decision depends on several factors, the book examines how AI and ML can be used to model equations and define constraints to solve problems and discover proper and valid solutions more easily. It also looks at how automation plays a significant role in minimizing human labor and thereby minimizes overall time and cost.

AI is an integral part of every video game. This book helps professionals keep up with the constantly evolving technological advances in the fast growing game industry and equips students with up-to-date information they need to jumpstart their careers. This revised and updated Third Edition includes new techniques, algorithms, data structures and representations needed to create powerful AI in games. Key Features A comprehensive professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games Includes new exercises so readers can test their comprehension and understanding of the concepts and practices presented Revised and updated to cover new techniques and advances in AI Walks the reader through the entire game AI development process

The second edition of Game Anim expands upon the first edition with an all-new chapter on 2D and Pixel Art Animation, an enhanced mocap chapter covering the latest developments in Motion Matching, and even more interviews with top professionals in the field. Combined with everything in the first edition, this updated edition provides the reader with an even more comprehensive understanding of all areas of video game animation – from small indie projects to the latest AAA blockbusters. Key Features • New 2nd Edition Content: An all-new chapter on 2D and Pixel Art Animation, Motion Matching, and more • 20 Years of Insight: Accumulated knowledge from 2 decades of experience in all areas of game animation. • The 5 Fundamentals: Reinterprets the classic 12 animation principles and sets out 5 new fundamentals for great game animation. • Full Production Cycle: Walks through every stage of a game production from the animator’s perspective. • Animator Interviews: Notable game animators offer behind-the-scenes stories, tips, and advice. • Free Animation Rig: Free "AZRI" maya rig, tutorials and other resources on the accompanying website: www.gameanim.com/book About The Author Jonathan Cooper is an award-winning video game animator who has brought virtual characters to life professionally since 2000, leading teams on large projects such as the Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect series, with a focus on memorable stories and characters and cutting-edge video game animation. He has since focused on interactive cinematics in the latest chapters of the DICE and Annie award-winning series Uncharted and The Last of Us. Jonathan has presented at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and at other conferences across Canada and the United Kingdom. He holds a Bachelor of Design honors degree in animation.