There is much interest in using large pre-trained models in Automatic Game Design (AGD), whether via the generation of code, assets, or more abstract conceptualization of design ideas. But so far, this interest largely stems from the ad hoc use of such generative models under persistent human supervision. Much work remains to show how these tools can be integrated into longer-time-horizon AGD pipelines, in which systems interface with game engines to test generated content autonomously. To this end, we introduce ScriptDoctor, a Large Language Model (LLM)-driven system for automatically generating and testing games in PuzzleScript, an expressive but highly constrained description language for turn-based puzzle games over 2D gridworlds. ScriptDoctor generates and tests game design ideas in an iterative loop, where human-authored examples are used to ground the system's output, compilation errors from the PuzzleScript engine are used to elicit functional code, and search-based agents play-test generated games. ScriptDoctor serves as a concrete example of the potential of automated, openended LLM-based workflows in generating novel game content.

The perceived similarity between human and robot personalities significantly impacts human–robot interaction (HRI), carrying ethical and psychological implications. This study examines the longitudinal evolution of personality similarity by analyzing Big Five personality trait descriptions in the Google Books corpus from 1960 to 2019. Our research revealed two primary findings: (a) Personality similarity demonstrated an overall increasing trend with a notable deceleration around 1980, potentially reflecting technological advancements and societal apprehensions; (b) A distinct hierarchy of trait similarities emerged. Openness exhibited the highest similarity to human personalities, followed by agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. This nuanced hierarchy suggests that human expectations of robotic personalities are not uniform across traits. By tracing historical perceptions of human-robot personality similarities, this study provides a comprehensive foundation for future HRI research and ethical considerations in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning (PCGRL) has been introduced as a means by which controllable designer agents can be trained based only on a set of computable metrics acting as a proxy for the level’s quality and key characteristics. While PCGRL offers a unique set of affordances for game designers, it is constrained by the compute-intensive process of training RL agents, and has so far been limited to generating relatively small levels. To address this issue of scale, we implement several PCGRL environments in Jax so that all aspects of learning and simulation happen in parallel on the GPU, resulting in faster environment simulation; removing the CPU-GPU transfer of information bottleneck during RL training; and ultimately resulting in significantly improved training speed. We replicate several key results from prior works in this new framework, letting models train for much longer than previously studied, and evaluating their behavior after 1 billion timesteps. Aiming for greater control for human designers, we introduce randomized level sizes and frozen “pinpoints” of pivotal game tiles as further ways of countering overfitting. To test the generalization ability of learned generators, we evaluate models on large, out-of-distribution map sizes, and find that partial observation sizes learn more robust design strategies.

Path of Destruction (PoD) is a self-supervised method for learning iterative generators. The core idea is to produce a training set by destroying a set of artifacts, and for each destructive step create a training instance based on the corresponding repair action. A generator trained on this dataset can then generate new artifacts by "repairing" from arbitrary states. The PoD method is very data-efficient in terms of original training examples and well-suited to functional artifacts composed of categorical data, such as game levels and discrete 3D structures. In this paper, we extend the Path of Destruction method to allow designer control over aspects of the generated artifacts. Controllability is introduced by adding conditional inputs to the state-action pairs that make up the repair trajectories. We test the controllable PoD method in a 2D dungeon setting, as well as in the domain of small 3D Lego cars.

Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning (PCGRL) foregoes the need for large human-authored data-sets and allows agents to train explicitly on functional constraints, using computable, user-defined measures of quality instead of target output. We explore the application of PCGRL to 3D domains, in which content-generation tasks naturally have greater complexity and potential pertinence to real-world applications. Here, we introduce several PCGRL tasks for the 3D domain, Minecraft. These tasks will challenge RL-based generators using affordances often found in 3D environments, such as jumping, multiple dimensional movement, and gravity. We train agents to optimize each of these tasks to explore the capabilities of existing in PCGRL. The agents are able to generate relatively complex and diverse levels, and generalize to random initial states and control targets. Controllability tests in the presented tasks demonstrate their utility to analyze success and failure for 3D generators. We argue that these generators could serve both as co-creative tools for game designers, and as pre-trained environment generators in curriculum learning for player agents.