Pseudo-visibility: A Game Mechanic Involving Willful Ignorance

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Samuel Alexander, Arthur Paul Pedersen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: LibraryPress@UF 2022-05-01
Series:Proceedings of the International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference
Online Access:https://journals.flvc.org/FLAIRS/article/view/130652
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question.
ISSN:2334-0754
2334-0762