It’s ridiculously easy to take a bad photograph. We’re dying to play through some gnarly levels whipped up by the AI from Hackaday readers!Ĭontinue reading “Neural Networks Using Doom Level Creator Like It’s 1993” → Posted in Games, Slider Tagged ai, artificial intelligence, artificial neural network, doom, neural net, neural network, video game, video games
After all, how hard can it be? Joking aside, we would love to see you take this concept and run with it. We can only guess that these researcher’s next step is to use similar techniques to create an entire game (levels, characters, and music) via AI. Each row is one map, and each image is one aspect of the map (floor, height, things, and walls, from left to right) This is partially due to a lack of good metrics to describe levels and AI-generated data. However, while the AI-generated levels appeared similar at a high level to human-generated levels, many of the little details that humans tend to include were omitted. While both networks used in this project produce good levels, the one that included other metrics resulted in higher quality levels. If you’d like a better understanding of GANs, covered it in his guide to the evolving world of neural networks. They considered two types of GANs when generating new levels: one that just used the appearance of the training maps, and another that used both the appearance and metrics such as the number of rooms, perimeter length, etc. GANs are a type of neural network which learns from training data and then generates similar data.
The researchers used Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to analyze existing DOOM maps and then generate new maps similar to the originals. The idea of an AI generating levels is simple in concept but difficult in execution. The screenshot shown above is an example of an AI generated level and the gameplay can be seen in the video below. In effect they learn from what great game designers have already done and apply those lesson to new level generation. Instead, they generate new content by using existing, human-generated levels as a model. While procedural level generation has been around for decades, recent advances in machine learning to generate game content (usually levels) are different because they don’t use a human-defined algorithm. Researchers from Politecnico di Milano are using artificial intelligence to create new levels for the classic DOOM shooter (PDF whitepaper). Now computers scientists are getting in on that fun in a new way. There was something magical about carefully crafting a level and then dialing up your friends for a death match session on the new map. Readers of a certain vintage will remember the glee of building your own levels for DOOM.