A Special Session at IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and
Games
Perth, Australia
15-18 December, 2008

Special Session Chairs: Julian Togelius, Alan Blair and Philip
Hingston
Contact: julian.togelius AT gmail.com

Submission deadline: 15 July 2008
( see the call for papers at http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/cig08/cfp.html
)

Description:

In coevolution, the fitness of a solution is determined not (only) by
a fixed fitness function, but also by the other solution(s) being
evaluated. Thus, coevolution has the potential to overcome several
problems with static fitness functions, paving the way for more open-
ended evolution. However, several phenomena common to coevolutionary
algorithms are at present poorly understood, including cycling and
loss of gradient. Further understanding of such phenomena would
facilitate more widespread use of coevolutionary algorithms.

This special session seeks to bring together research that uses
coevolutionary algorithms to learn to play games, uses games to
investigate coevolution, or uses coevolution as a basis for game
design. Due to their adversarial nature, often involving interaction
of multiple agents, games are uniquely suited to be combined with
coevolution. We invite both theoretical and applied work in the
intersection of coevolution and games, including but not limited to
the following topics:

Competitive coevolution
Cooperative coevolution
Multiple populations in coevolution
Coevolution with diverse representations
Theory of coevolution
Preventing cycling and loss of gradient
Coevolution-based game design
Self-play and coevolutionary-like reinforcement learning
Relative versus absolute fitness metrics

About the organisers:

Julian Togelius is a researcher at the Dalle Molle Institute for
Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA) in Lugano, Switzerland. His research
interests include evolving game-playing agents, modelling player
behaviour, and evolving interesting game content, mainly using
evolutionary and coevolutionary techniques. He also co-organizes the
well-attended Simulated Car Racing Competitions for the IEEE CIG and
CEC conferences.

Philip Hingston is an associate professor of computer science at Edith
Cowan University in Perth. His research interests are in the theory
and application of artificial intelligence and computational
intelligence. He has a particular interest in evolutionary computation
as a tool for design, and in computer games. He is chair of the IEEE
CIS Task Force on co-evolution. More information can be found on his
home page at: http://www.scis.ecu.edu.au/Staff/staffinfo.aspx?staffid=phingsto.