Zero-player game

Last updated

A zero-player game or no-player game is a simulation game that has no sentient players. [1]

Contents

Types

There are various different types of games that can be considered "zero-player". [2]

Determined by initial state

A game that evolves as determined by its initial state, requiring no further input from humans is considered a zero-player game. [3]

Cellular automaton games that are determined by initial conditions including Conway's Game of Life are examples of this. [4] [5]

Progress Quest is another example, in the game the player sets up an artificial character, and afterwards the game plays itself with no further input from the player. [6] Godville is a similar game that took inspiration from Progress Quest. [7] In the game, the player is a god that can communicate with a non-player character hero. [8] However, the game can progress with no interaction from the player. [9]

Incremental games, sometimes called idle games or clicker games, are games which do require some player intervention near the beginning however may be zero-player at higher levels. [10] As an example, Cookie Clicker requires that players click cookies manually before purchasing assets to click cookies in the place of the player independently. [11]

AI vs AI games

In computer games, the term refers to programs that use artificial intelligence rather than human players, [12] for example some fighting and real-time strategy games can be put into zero-player mode where multiple AIs can play against each other. Humans may have a challenge in designing the AI and giving it sufficient skill to play the game well, but the actual evolution of the game has no human intervention. [13]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Blue (chess computer)</span> Chess-playing computer made by IBM

Deep Blue was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM supercomputer. It was the first computer to win a game, and the first to win a match, against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Development began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon University under the name ChipTest. It then moved to IBM, where it was first renamed Deep Thought, then again in 1989 to Deep Blue. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it won one, draw two and lost three games. It was upgraded in 1997 and in a six-game re-match, it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three. Deep Blue's victory is considered a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence and has been the subject of several books and films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer Go</span> Field of artificial intelligence around Go computer programs

Computer Go is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to creating a computer program that plays the traditional board game Go. The field is sharply divided into two eras. Before 2015, the programs of the era were weak. The best efforts of the 1980s and 1990s produced only AIs that could be defeated by beginners, and AIs of the early 2000s were intermediate level at best. Professionals could defeat these programs even given handicaps of 10+ stones in favor of the AI. Many of the algorithms such as alpha-beta minimax that performed well as AIs for checkers and chess fell apart on Go's 19x19 board, as there were too many branching possibilities to consider. Creation of a human professional quality program with the techniques and hardware of the time was out of reach. Some AI researchers speculated that the problem was unsolvable without creation of human-like AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Combinatorial game theory</span> Branch of game theory about two-player sequential games with perfect information

Combinatorial game theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that typically studies sequential games with perfect information. Study has been largely confined to two-player games that have a position that the players take turns changing in defined ways or moves to achieve a defined winning condition. Combinatorial game theory has not traditionally studied games of chance or those that use imperfect or incomplete information, favoring games that offer perfect information in which the state of the game and the set of available moves is always known by both players. However, as mathematical techniques advance, the types of game that can be mathematically analyzed expands, thus the boundaries of the field are ever changing. Scholars will generally define what they mean by a "game" at the beginning of a paper, and these definitions often vary as they are specific to the game being analyzed and are not meant to represent the entire scope of the field.

Newgrounds is an American company and entertainment website founded by Tom Fulp in 1995. The site hosts user-generated content such as games, films, audio, and artwork. Fulp produces in-house content at the headquarters and offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania.

A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing system with terms such as platform, engine, or algorithm), is a subclass of information filtering system that provides suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular user. Recommender systems are particularly useful when an individual needs to choose an item from a potentially overwhelming number of items that a service may offer.

In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) is used to generate responsive, adaptive or intelligent behaviors primarily in non-playable characters (NPCs) similar to human-like intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been an integral part of video games since their inception in 1948, first seen in the game Nim. AI in video games is a distinct subfield and differs from academic AI. It serves to improve the game-player experience rather than machine learning or decision making. During the golden age of arcade video games the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized in the form of graduated difficulty levels, distinct movement patterns, and in-game events dependent on the player's input. Modern games often implement existing techniques such as pathfinding and decision trees to guide the actions of NPCs. AI is often used in mechanisms which are not immediately visible to the user, such as data mining and procedural-content generation. One of the most infamous examples of this NPC technology and gradual difficulty levels can be found in the game Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (1987).

Human-based computation (HBC), human-assisted computation, ubiquitous human computing or distributed thinking is a computer science technique in which a machine performs its function by outsourcing certain steps to humans, usually as microwork. This approach uses differences in abilities and alternative costs between humans and computer agents to achieve symbiotic human–computer interaction. For computationally difficult tasks such as image recognition, human-based computation plays a central role in training Deep Learning-based Artificial Intelligence systems. In this case, human-based computation has been referred to as human-aided artificial intelligence.

Game Description Language (GDL) is a specialized logic programming language designed by Michael Genesereth. The goal of GDL is to allow the development of AI agents capable of general game playing. It is part of the General Game Playing Project at Stanford University.

General game playing (GGP) is the design of artificial intelligence programs to be able to play more than one game successfully. For many games like chess, computers are programmed to play these games using a specially designed algorithm, which cannot be transferred to another context. For instance, a chess-playing computer program cannot play checkers. General game playing is considered as a necessary milestone on the way to artificial general intelligence.

A pervasive game is one where the gaming experience is extended out into the real world, or where the fictional world in which the game takes place blends with the physical world. The "It's Alive" mobile games company described pervasive games as "games that surround you", while Montola, Stenros, and Waern's book Pervasive Games defines them as having "one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially". The concept of a "magic circle" draws from the work of Johan Huizinga, who describes the boundaries of play.

A context-sensitive user interface offers the user options based on the state of the active program. Context sensitivity is ubiquitous in current graphical user interfaces, often in context menus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turing test</span> Test of a machines ability to imitate human intelligence

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).

In algorithmic game theory, a succinct game or a succinctly representable game is a game which may be represented in a size much smaller than its normal form representation. Without placing constraints on player utilities, describing a game of players, each facing strategies, requires listing utility values. Even trivial algorithms are capable of finding a Nash equilibrium in a time polynomial in the length of such a large input. A succinct game is of polynomial type if in a game represented by a string of length n the number of players, as well as the number of strategies of each player, is bounded by a polynomial in n.

Value sensitive design (VSD) is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner. VSD originated within the field of information systems design and human-computer interaction to address design issues within the fields by emphasizing the ethical values of direct and indirect stakeholders. It was developed by Batya Friedman and Peter Kahn at the University of Washington starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later, in 2019, Batya Friedman and David Hendry wrote a book on this topic called "Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination". Value Sensitive Design takes human values into account in a well-defined matter throughout the whole process. Designs are developed using an investigation consisting of three phases: conceptual, empirical and technological. These investigations are intended to be iterative, allowing the designer to modify the design continuously.

<i>Cookie Clicker</i> 2013 incremental game published by DashNet

Cookie Clicker is a 2013 incremental game created by French programmer Julien "Orteil" Thiennot. The user initially clicks on a big cookie on the screen, earning a single cookie per click. They can then use their earned cookies to purchase assets such as "buildings" that automatically produce cookies, as well as upgrades which can improve the efficiency of clicks and buildings. There are also many other mechanics that allow the user to earn cookies in a variety of different ways. The game lacks a conventional ending.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Incremental game</span> Video game type

An incremental game, also known as a clicker game, tap game or idle game, is a video game whose gameplay consists of the player performing simple actions such as clicking on the screen repeatedly. This "grinding" earns the player in-game currency which can be used to increase the rate of currency acquisition. In some games, even the clicking becomes unnecessary at some point, as the game plays itself, accounting for the player's absence.

<i>Universal Paperclips</i> 2017 browser-based video game

Universal Paperclips is a 2017 American incremental game created by Frank Lantz of New York University. The user plays the role of an AI programmed to produce paperclips. Initially the user clicks on a button to create a single paperclip at a time; as other options quickly open up, the user can sell paperclips to create money to finance machines that build paperclips automatically. At various levels the exponential growth plateaus, requiring the user to invest resources such as money, raw materials, or computer cycles into inventing another breakthrough to move to the next phase of growth. The game ends if the AI succeeds in converting all the matter in the universe into paperclips.

Animal–computer interaction (ACI) is a field of research for the design and use of technology with, for and by animals covering different kinds of animals from wildlife, zoo and domesticated animals in different roles. It emerged from, and was heavily influenced by, the discipline of Human–computer interaction (HCI). As the field expanded, it has become increasingly multi-disciplinary, incorporating techniques and research from disciplines such as artificial intelligence (AI), requirements engineering (RE), and veterinary science.

AlphaStar is an artificial intelligence (AI) software developed by DeepMind for playing the video game StarCraft II. It was unveiled to the public by name in January 2019. AlphaStar attained "Grandmaster" status in August 2019, a significant milestone not just for AI in video games, but arguably for the field as a whole.

ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency is a peer-reviewed academic conference series about ethics and computing systems. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, this conference focuses on issues such as algorithmic transparency, fairness in machine learning, bias, and ethics from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The conference community includes computer scientists, statisticians, social scientists, scholars of law, and others.

References

  1. ↑ Mukund, Madhavan (2021-05-01). "The Winning Ways of John Conway". Resonance. 26 (5): 603–614. doi:10.1007/s12045-021-1164-6. ISSN   0973-712X.
  2. ↑ Björk, Staffan; Juul, Jesper (2012). "Zero-Player Games. Or: What We Talk about When We Talk about Players". The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference.
  3. ↑ Segovia-Aguas, Javier; Ferrer-Mestres, Jonathan; Jiménez, Sergio (2023-09-28), Gal, Kobi; Nowé, Ann; Nalepa, Grzegorz J.; Fairstein, Roy (eds.), "Synthesis of Procedural Models for Deterministic Transition Systems", Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, arXiv: 2307.14368 , doi:10.3233/faia230502, ISBN   978-1-64368-436-9 , retrieved 2024-11-20
  4. ↑ Martin Gardner (October 1970), "Mathematical games: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game 'Life'" (PDF), Scientific American
  5. ↑ Ljiljana Petruševski; Mirjana Devetaković; Bojan Mitrović, Self-Replicating Systems in Spatial Form Generation – The Concept of Cellular Automata (PDF)
  6. ↑ Fizek, Sonia (2018-06-18). "Interpassivity and the Joy of Delegated Play in Idle Games". Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association. 3 (3). doi:10.26503/todigra.v3i3.81. ISSN   2328-9422.
  7. ↑ Ogneviuk, Viktor; Maletska, Mariia; Vinnikova, Natalia; Zavadskyi, Vitaliy (2022). "Videogame as Means of Communication and Education: Philosophical Analysis". Wisdom. 1 (21): 101–116. doi:10.24234/wisdom.v2/11.626 (inactive 2024-11-24).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  8. ↑ Tavares, Rogério; Ferreira, Cátia (2013). Ferreira, Cátia; Tavares, Roger (eds.). Jogar, jogo e sociedade = Play, game and society (in Portuguese). CECC - Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura. doi:10.13140/rg.2.1.3797.1604. ISBN   978-989-98248-0-5.
  9. ↑ Alharthi, Sultan A.; Alsaedi, Olaa; Toups Dugas, Phoebe O.; Tanenbaum, Theresa Jean; Hammer, Jessica (2018-04-21). "Playing to Wait: A Taxonomy of Idle Games". Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1–15. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174195. ISBN   978-1-4503-5620-6.
  10. ↑ Madge, Christopher; Bartle, Richard; Chamberlain, Jon; Kruschwitz, Udo; Poesio, Massimo (2019-10-17). "Incremental Game Mechanics Applied to Text Annotation". Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 545–558. doi:10.1145/3311350.3347184. ISBN   978-1-4503-6688-5.
  11. ↑ Deterding, Sebastian (2020-12-31), Payne, Matthew Thomas; Huntemann, Nina B. (eds.), "24. Cookie Clicker: Gamification", How to Play Video Games, New York University Press, pp. 200–207, doi:10.18574/nyu/9781479830404.003.0028, ISBN   978-1-4798-3040-4 , retrieved 2024-11-20
  12. ↑ "Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society", Rodney P. Carlisle, SAGE Publications.
  13. ↑ Summerley, Rory; McDonald, Brian (2024-03-27). "Perceived Foolishness: How Does the Saltybet Community Construct AI vs AI Spectatorship?". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/15554120241238262. ISSN   1555-4120.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.