New paper on procedural animation

This is a longer, journal paper on the Twig procedural animation system, submitted to the new journal IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (full disclosure: I’m an associate editor).  This paper documents a fair amount more than the AIIDE paper, including object manipulation scripting, and a little bit about the authoring tools.

New paper on inference/action-selection – comments welcome

This is a paper I wrote for ICFDG that takes some work from my previous life as a roboticist and applies it to Twig (the procedural animation system I’ve been working on).  However, it’s situated in a tradition that the games community, and even the present-day AI community isn’t very familiar with, so much of the paper is an attempt to survey and explain the literature on using combinational logic for inference – why you’d want to do it, why it’s limited, and what you can do to overcome some of the limitations.  And even then, I’m worried that it won’t be transparent to the reader; not because it’s technically difficult, but just because the motivations won’t be clear.  Anyhow, any advice would be welcome.

fall symposium talk slides

Here are the slides from my position paper at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Naturally Inspired Artificial Intelligence.

the passing of a friend

 

 

My friend Patrick Welch, a painter, comic artist, and professor at the Illinois Institute of Art, passed away recently.  He will be greatly missed.  Drink a beer for him for me.

my other blog

I’ve been maintaining a separate blog that’s specifically for Twig, the procedural animation system I’ve talked about a little here.  You can find the blog here.  At the moment, it’s more active than this site because that’s where most of my limited hacking and thinking cycles are going.

The blog also includes pointers to the episodes of a “webcomic” that I’m doing with Twig as a way of testing out features and guiding feature implementation.

Final version of AIIDE paper on procedural animation

This is the revised version of the AIIDE paper on Twig, the procedural animation library I’ve been working on.  I’m going to do a longer journal version of it, so suggestions are very welcome.

Another paper

Men are Dogs (and Women too).  This one’s for the AAAI Fall Symposium on Natural Computation.  It’s my latest effort to try to get my intuitions about cognitive architecture onto paper.  There are a bunch of other arguments that I want to fold into it, but it’s already overdue, so they’ll have to wait for the camera ready copy.  Comments and suggestions welcome.

Procedural animation paper

Sorry for being off the air for so long.  This is a paper I did for AIIDE on the procedural animation work I’ve been doing.  Unfortunately, rather too much of it was written during a 39 hour plane-trip-gone-bad, so I was pretty seriously sleep deprived when I wrote it.  Comments welcome.

Things are winding down for me at school now, so I should be posting more.  There’s another AI paper coming in a few days.

Coming up for air

Last quarter I was teaching 3 classes, so I’m just getting my head above water now.  I’ll try to start posting regularly again now.  I’ve gotten at least a little bit of hacking done and should have a pre-alpha release of the humanoid animation code in time for GDC.

What is computation?

I’ve posted an essay I wrote as a first reading for my intro programming courses – both animate arts and our EECS course.  It’s called What is Computation? and the idea is to combat the perception of computer science as being purely about fussy details of coding by placing computation in a social and historical context, and using that as a way of introducing some of the fundamental concepts that make information technology fundamentally different from other technologies.  Comments welcome.