Your next game might be built by a machine. And we don’t mean a Red Bull fueled coder.
Michael Cook, a doctoral candidate in the UK, has put together a “labrat” called Angelina. Angelina is an experiment in evolutionary computing: as she figures out problems, her overall output and efficiency improves.
So where do the games come in? They give her a problem to solve. She breaks down each part of a game as a “species,” and builds a game. Then, creepily, she simulates a human playing said game to find possible problems and glitches. Then she runs it by Cook to see if it works.
Now, she’s not going to take over gaming tomorrow — a human still has to design the graphics and music — but you can play Angelina’s games on Cook’s site and they’re actually pretty good, if kind of simple. And hey, who knows, in the future, we could use computers to make our third-person shooters and endless MMOs. They already have the recipe to make a boring, lengthy fetch quest, after all.
(Image via Shutterstock)