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I’m smiling, I swear. Going for a walk to take advantage of our extra hour. I’m not cold, you’re cold. #sundayselfie #frozenhands #howlingwinds #exag (at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) https://www.instagram.com/p/CHEEuCJHvyq/?igshid=19wctspmaeajn
Holder's Next 'Chapter'? Ex-AG signals possible run for office, trashes Nunes memo
Visit Now - http://zeroviral.com/holders-next-chapter-ex-ag-signals-possible-run-for-office-trashes-nunes-memo/
Holder's Next 'Chapter'? Ex-AG signals possible run for office, trashes Nunes memo
Eric Holder talks about his future at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.
(Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor.)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters on Wednesday that he hasn’t ruled out a run for political office, during a D.C. breakfast where he also took swipes at the controversial ‘Nunes memo’ on alleged surveillance abuse during the Obama administration.
During a Christian Science Monitor Newsmaker breakfast, the Obama-era attorney general said he would make a decision by the end of the year on whether there may be “another chapter” in his government service.
Holder has kept a high political profile since leaving the Obama administration, advising California on Trump administration legal challenges and diving into the debate over the gerrymandering of congressional districts. Holder opened his remarks Wednesday with the latter subject, saying he “sat down with President Obama” for a few hours recently to discuss ways to combat gerrymandering – which Holder sees as an obstacle to getting African-Americans to the ballot box.
Meanwhile, Holder slammed the memo commissioned by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that alleged problems with how a surveillance warrant was obtained for a Trump associate in 2016. Holder called the memo “inaccurate in a number of ways” and added that he hoped the “Schiff memo” would be released, a reference to Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff’s rebuttal.
He mocked the Trump White House for saying it wants to hear from the DOJ and FBI before releasing the Schiff memo. “Really? Did you do that with the Nunes memo? In spite of the fact the DOJ called it extremely reckless?” Holder said, referring to the “rare” statement the FBI made in opposition to releasing the Nunes memo.
“You didn’t listen to them then, but now you will listen? It will be interesting to see how that works out,” he said.
Holder also touched on the ongoing Russia collusion probe.
Fox News’ John Roberts has reported that lawyers close to President Trump are counseling him to avoid an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Holder said that’s “a determination that he and his lawyers will make,” adding that Trump could use the Fifth Amendment, “which would be fatal for any other politician, but he said he can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not suffer the consequences.”
Holder also commented on former FBI Director James Comey, who frequently trolls the Trump administration on Twitter, but was criticized by Hillary Clinton and her allies for announcing the reopening of her email probe in the closing days of the 2016 race.
Holder called Comey, “a good man who made a wrong decision in the way he dealt with the end of the Hillary Clinton inquiry.”
Jake Gibson is a producer working at the Fox News Washington bureau who covers politics, law enforcement and intelligence issues.
Experimental AI In Games, Day 2
Just like yesterday, we had seven different paper talks, each grouped broadly into 3 different categories. Unlike yesterday, two of the presentations were delivered via
Procedural Content Generation
Mixed Reality and Procedural Content Generation in Video (Sasha Azad, Carl Saldanha, Cheng Hann Gan and Mark Riedl)
Intelligent Physiotherapy Through Procedural Content Generation (Tommy Thompson and Shabnam Esfahlani)
I’ll be honest, calling these papers simply PCG is doing them a bit of disservice - they, specifically, are PCG for Augmented/Virtual reality, and both are taking different approaches to the problem. While neither of these papers are necessarily in my domain persay, there’s a lot of really interesting game design questions that they both alternately raise and solve with their systems.
Theories
Proceduralist Readings, Procedurally (Chris Martens, Adam Summerville, Michael Mateas, Joseph Osborn, Sarah Harmon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Arnav Jhala)
Computatrum Personae: Toward a Role-Based Taxonomy of (Computationally Assisted) Performance(Benjamin Samuel, James Ryan, Adam Summerville, Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin)
The Proceduralist Readings paper was something I found super interesting - the notion of using ASP to automatically derive meaning from a game was never something that I would have thought up, but am super glad to see that it happened, and it gave me an excuse to think about how to ground out styles into meanings. The other paper was an interesting taxonomy of performative semi-computational systems, which was also super cool, even merely on the level of “wow I didn’t even know that many of these systems existed”
Platformers (aka Mario)
What Does Bach Have in Common withWorld 1-1: Automatic Platformer Gestalt Analysis (Johnathan Pagnutti)
Learning Player Tailored Content From Observation: Platformer Level Generation from Video Traces using LSTMs (Adam Summerville, Matthew Guzdial, Michael Mateas and Mark Riedl)
Deep Static and Dynamic Level Analysis: A Study on Infinite Mario (Matthew Guzdial, Nathan Sturtevant and Boyang Li)
And finally, this wouldn’t be a games conference if we didn’t have a whole boat load of papers about Mario. Again, not really my wheel house, but I definitely enjoyed all of the presentations.
Tomorrow brings another day, and the full AIIDE conference!
Experimental AI In Games, Day 1
Today was the first day of EXAG16, a workshop “interested in building better games, new kinds of game, and exciting things that might not be games at all.”
Seven different papers were presented - spanning from doing Machine Learning over DOTA2 draft predictions, to Dear Happy Leader’s Story Time - an improv party game centered around hamming up the tropetastic tales that the planner generates.
And they were all fantastic! Amazing scholarship, all around. But since memory has an annoying tendency to fade quickly, one of the things I’m hoping to do here is commit all of the things that I’ve looked at to digital ink now rather than later. I won’t re-write the description of the papers, since the conference did a FANTASTIC job of that here.
The talks were streamed, and once I verify the links (one for the morning, one for the afternoon), I’ll put those here.
So, without further ado:
Prediction (AKA Machine Learning)
Predicting Resource Locations in Game Maps (Scott Lee, Aaron Isaksen, Christoffer Holmgård and Julian Togelius)
Draft-Analysis Of The Ancients: Predicting Draft Picks In DotA 2 Using Machine Learning (Adam Summerville, Michael Cook and Ben Steenhuisen)
So, I’ll be honest: Machine Learning for Machine Learning’s sake isn’t something that really interests me. So the results that these papers got (while interesting) weren’t the main take-aways I got from these papers. What I found super interesting was the potential use cases for the knowledge learned by the ML systems - for instance, a map-building tool that helps you place resources in “good” ways, or a tool for either game casters or newish players for picking Champions in a DotA draft. After all, we’ve seen a LOT of success coming out of Centaur (or Cyborg) chess when you have humans who are experts at working with a fairly advanced AI system.
Models
A Model of Superposed States (Justus Robertson and R. Michael Young)
A Programming Model for Boss Encounters in 2D Action Games (Kristin Siu, Eric Butler and Alexander Zook)
These papers were both very interesting for me, since I’ve been thinking a lot about encoding and computer representations of things in my own work. The notion of having a superposition of possible states for narrative that can get cashed out such that some constraints are violated reminds me a lot of my own work on style (for one of the many, many definitions of style that’s been kicking around in the back of my brain), and I’d love to see what happens when the goals can be satisfied in various ways, or if the things that the player can observe are differing, etc etc. And the entire notion of having a model for 2D boss fights (across a wide swath of genres) is super interesting as well. Here, we have a much of unique encounters within their games, getting divorced from said game’s context and described in such a way such that you could form bosses that have stylistic characteristics from the pile of existing mechanics.
Stories
ClueGen: An exploration of procedural storytelling in the format of murder mystery games (Andrew Stockdale)
Dear Leader’s Happy Story Time: A Party Game Based on Automated Story Generation (Ian Horswill)
Juke Joint: Characters Who Are Moved By Music (James Ryan, Tyler Brothers, Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin)
Stories are a not-so-secret side interest of mine, but well, I think that’s true of, like, my entire lab. And all of these story systems are taking radically different approaches to story things. ClueGen and DLHST are both games after my own heart - as I’ve attempted to figure out how to murder mystery in the past (for ClueGen), and DLHST is an AI system for Improv based on TVTropes. Ian Horswill knows me on a spiritual level, it seems. For the actual generation for these, ClueGen used a fairly straightforward process for tying together its setup at the start of the game, and it hit on some very interesting things with the combinations of backstories that came together nicely. Andrew also had some very nice takeaways in his slides. For DLHST, we have a Prolog planning system that chained tropes together into interesting ways, after throwing some random character descriptions on top of the entities needed.
Finally, Juke Joint is basically James Ryan taking all of the weird magic that he’s been working on over the time I’ve known him and mashed it all up into a single system - Town History generation and Tagged Grammars for Dialog generation - and fused them with a psuedo-neural mental state representation for how the characters in the game react to outside stimuli.
Of course, feel free to ask any questions you like - I don’t know if the papers are available for any/everyone, but yeah! These are my takeaways for these papers. There’s going to be another one of these everyday until Wednesday - so tune in then!
2v2 Tournament
Come join EXAG in our tournament Saturday March 5 at 8 pm eastern time. For more details message me here or add EXL Skatzman on Xbox one.
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