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Genetic Programming and Coevolution to Play the Bomberman™ Video Game

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Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13989))

Abstract

The field of video games is of great interest to researchers in computational intelligence due to the complex, rich and dynamic nature they provide. We propose using Genetic Programming with coevolution and lexicographic fitness to generate an agent that plays the Bomberman™game. We investigate two sets of Genetic Programming building blocks: one contains conditions relative to movement, and the other does not. We aim to see whether the benefits of these movement-related conditions outweigh the negatives caused by increased search space size. We show that the benefits gained do not outweigh the increase in search space size.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.gocoder.one/bomberland.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded by national funds through the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., within the scope of the project CISUC - UID/CEC/00326/2020 and by European Social Fund, through the Regional Operational Program Centro 2020. This work is also supported by the Ministerio español de Economía y Competitividad under project PID2020-115570GB-C22 (DemocratAI::UGR). The second author is funded by Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal, under the grant 2022.11314.BD. This work started as a project at the first SPECIES Summer School 2022 (https://species-society.org/summer-school-2022/), for which we would also like to thank the organisers.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ALFA, MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, USA

    Robert Gold, Erik Hemberg & Una-May O’Reilly

  2. Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Henrique Branquinho

  3. Department of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Pablo García-Sánchez

Authors
  1. Robert Gold
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  2. Henrique Branquinho
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  3. Erik Hemberg
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  4. Una-May O’Reilly
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  5. Pablo García-Sánchez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pablo García-Sánchez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    João Correia

  2. University of York, York, UK

    Stephen Smith

  3. Al Hussein Technical University, Amman, Jordan

    Raneem Qaddoura

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Gold, R., Branquinho, H., Hemberg, E., O’Reilly, UM., García-Sánchez, P. (2023). Genetic Programming and Coevolution to Play the Bomberman™ Video Game. In: Correia, J., Smith, S., Qaddoura, R. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13989. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30229-9_49

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30229-9_49

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-30229-9

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