Or for short, taatgoyw.

The coming months I am going to be working on my thesis project. My goal is to solve a pretty simple problem in an interesting way. I see this problem all over the place however, games where the NPC doesn’t even blink to indicate that you are running into them.

The work will be done using the AIGameDev.com sandbox. The benefit of this is an array of great people to ask for help, a website with a lot of information on my subject and an engine with all the components I need to start working on this project.

The idea is to from a simple model of the interaction, design a system that can solve this. The system will use reinforcement learning and a policy aimed to teach the agent how to step out of the way off the player. With everything in place a demo will be constructed to show this behaviour.

• Design a simple model for the interaction.
• Animate a number of steps appropriate for this behaviour.
• Learn the sandbox animation system.
• Implement using Reinforcement learning in the sandbox.
• Create a small demo.

My goal is to work with reinforcement learning as an area that seems to need more work before it can fully bloom. Hopefully the result will be simple and effective, and give way for other uses for the system in an animation context.

Richard