Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Personal And Multicultural Journey Through The World Of Games (With A Little Math) Or Book Review: Around The World In Eighty Games, By Marcus Du Sautoy, Karl-Dieter Crisman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Author and number theorist Marcus Du Sautoy has written a book about games, including a light dose of mathematics. In it, he journeys through far more than (his choice of) eighty of “the world’s greatest games”, laying out a charming voyage through many lands. Despite some reservations, this reviewer finds that Around the World in Eighty Games is well-written and quite fascinating, largely due to its idiosyncratic, personal nature.

By The Campfire: How Representation In Video Games Can Be Improved, Hunter Smith

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

By the Campfire is a video game designed with accurate and thorough representation in mind from the start of development. Its purpose is to showcase the ways in which the player character in a video game can accurately represent anyone who plays it, and that the non-player characters in a video game can be generated in a way that diverse groups can be represented without harmfully misrepresenting them. This project includes a document that explains the process by which this game was created and why certain choices were made when implementing the games systems. The document details a survey that …

Cooperative Deep Q -Learning Framework For Environments Providing Image Feedback, Krishnan Raghavan, Vignesh Narayanan, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Publications

In this article, we address two key challenges in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) setting, sample inefficiency, and slow learning, with a dual-neural network (NN)-driven learning approach. In the proposed approach, we use two deep NNs with independent initialization to robustly approximate the action-value function in the presence of image inputs. In particular, we develop a temporal difference (TD) error-driven learning (EDL) approach, where we introduce a set of linear transformations of the TD error to directly update the parameters of each layer in the deep NN. We demonstrate theoretically that the cost minimized by the EDL regime is an approximation …

Aesthetic Choices: Defining The Range Of Aesthetic Views In Interactive Digital Media Including Games And 3d Virtual Environments (3d Ves), Hira Maqbool

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Defining aesthetic choices for interactive digital media such as games is a challenging task. Objective and subjective factors such as colour, symmetry, order and complexity, and statistical features among others play an important role for defining the aesthetic properties of interactive digital artifacts. Computational approaches developed in this regard also consider objective factors such as statistical image features for the assessment of aesthetic qualities. However, aesthetics for interactive digital media, such as games, requires more nuanced consideration than simple objective and subjective factors, for choosing a range of aesthetic features.

From the study it was found that the there is …

Lingering Effects Associated With The Consumer Use Of Virtual Reality, John Porter Iii, Andrew Robb

Open Access Publishing Fund

Since the release of the Oculus Rift CV1 in 2016, millions of VR headsets have made their way into consumers’ homes. Since then, users have created large quantities of data about their experiences in VR through posts made to online discussion forums. We examine this data to gain insights on what sorts of “lingering effects” users report having experienced after VR, and on the progression of these effects over time. We found three major categories of lingering effects (besides simulator sickness) during our qualitative analysis: perceptual effects, behavioral effects, and changes in dreams. The perceptual and behavioral categories were further …

Engaging Students During Research Through The Use Of Games, Francisco Gonzalez

Theses and Dissertations

Engaging students during a research seminar/meeting can be a difficult challenge, and as as student myself, I can attest to how difficult actively listening to a presentation can be. As such, upon researching more ways to have an audience engaged, one of the most promising concepts is the use of games. Games, in any form, can be very engaging to a person, and even more so if there is active engagement and participation within an audience group. With this concept in mind, I decided to take it upon myself to create a game based around a theoretical computer …

Predicting League Of Legends Ranked Games Outcome, Ngoc Linh Chi Nguyen

Senior Projects Spring 2022

League of Legends (LoL) is the one of most popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games in the world. For LoL, the most competitive way to evaluate a player’s skill level, below the professional Esports level, is competitive ranked games. These ranked games utilize a matchmaking system based on the player’s ranks to form a fair team for each game. However, a rank game's outcome cannot necessarily be predicted using just players’ ranks, there are a significant number of different variables impacting a rank game depending on how well each team plays. In this paper, I propose a method to …

Generation Of Creative Game Scene Patterns By The Neutrosophic Genetic Cocoso Method, Aurimas Petrovas, Romualdas Bausys, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Creative procedural generation requires, by its nature, a nondeterministic result. Each set of outputs has to satisfy the required criteria and, at the same time, has to show unique results to be considered creative. One of the keys to increasing nondeterminism is to use fuzzy neutrosophic sets. A combination of a CoCoSo multi-criteria decision algorithm with a genetic algorithm to generate game scenes was proposed. The algorithm satisfies the required game rules and improves the aesthetics value of the visual game scene. The proposed approach seeks to produce a creative solution which satisfies the replayability principle, when the solution is …

Humans And The Core Partition: An Agent-Based Modeling Experiment, Andrew J. Collins, Sheida Etemadidavan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Although strategic coalition formation is traditionally modeled using cooperative game theory, behavioral game theorists have repeatedly shown that outcomes predicted by game theory are different from those generated by actual human behavior. To further explore these differences, in a cooperative game theory context, we experiment to compare the outcomes resulting from human participants’ behavior to those generated by a cooperative game theory solution mechanism called the core partition. Our experiment uses an interactive simulation of a glove game, a particular type of cooperative game, to collect the participant’s decision choices and their resultant outcomes. Two different glove games are considered, …

Difficulty In Video Games, Jason Bechdolt

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Throughout time games have been utilized for a great variety of purposes: relaxing leisure, competitive activity, intellectual exercise, and many other sources of enjoyment. The element of difficulty has existed in various degrees throughout all of those game styles, usually found through the skill of an opponent, but lately many games have been designed to have a digital opponent to provide that difficulty. With access to more information than ever before, people have gotten the chance to witness lives and worlds that they can never physically enjoy, and this has led to a considerable market for games that can provide …

Deeprepair: Style-Guided Repairing For Deep Neural Networks In The Real-World Operational Environment, Bing Yu, Hua Qi, Guo Qing, Felix Juefei-Xu, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are continuously expanding their application to various domains due to their high performance. Nevertheless, a well-trained DNN after deployment could oftentimes raise errors during practical use in the operational environment due to the mismatching between distributions of the training dataset and the potential unknown noise factors in the operational environment, e.g., weather, blur, noise, etc. Hence, it poses a rather important problem for the DNNs' real-world applications: how to repair the deployed DNNs for correcting the failure samples under the deployed operational environment while not harming their capability of handling normal or clean data with limited …

The Math Games Seminar: A Mathematical Learning Community, Anthony Delegge, Ellen Ziliak

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Learning communities can be an effective means of engaging university students across disciplines. Games have always been a source of both enjoyment and interesting mathematics. Based on our own interest in games, and the deep, strategic discussions we found ourselves having with students when we played games with them, we decided to design a learning community around the mathematics of games. We hoped in particular that such a community could be a great pathway to introducing mathematical thinking to students not majoring in mathematics, and that they would gain a greater appreciation for our field. In this paper, we describe …

Essays On Collective Contests And Bargaining., Dhritiman Gupta Dr.

Doctoral Theses

This thesis consists of three theoretical essays in Microeconomics. The first two essays analyze the properties of a particular class of prize sharing rules groups may employ in a situation of a collective contest with another group, over a private good. The third essay studies a situation of multi-lateral bargaining, where a buyer wants to successfully bargain with multiple sellers, who own an input each, so that he can implement a grand project. The main focus of the thesis is to theorize about and generate hypotheses of the situations summarized above. In the first chapter, we consider a situation of …

Universal Biological Motions For Educational Robot Theatre And Games, Rajesh Venkatachalapathy, Martin Zwick, Adam Slowik, Kai Brooks, Mikhail Mayers, Roman Minko, Tyler Hull, Bliss Brass, Marek Perkowski

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Paper presents a concept that is new to robotics education and social robotics. It is based on theatrical games, in motions for social robots and animatronic robots. Presented here motion model is based on Drift Differential Model from biology and Fokker-Planck equations. This model is used in various areas of science to describe many types of motion. The model was successfully verified on various simulated mobile robots and a motion game of three robots called "Mouse and Cheese."

A Highly-Parameterized Ensemble To Play Gin Rummy, Masayuki Nagai '22, Kavya Shrivastava '23, Kien Ta '22, Steven Bogaerts, Chad Byers

Computer Science Faculty publications

This paper describes the design and training of a computer Gin Rummy player. The system includes three main components to make decisions about drawing cards, discarding, and ending the game, with numerous parameters controlling behavior. In particular, an ensemble approach is explored in the discard decision. Finally, three sets of parameter tuning and performance experiments are analyzed.

Evaluation Of Algorithms For Randomizing Key Item Locations In Game Worlds, Caleb Johnson

LSU Master's Theses

In the past few years, game randomizers have become increasingly popular. In general, a game randomizer takes some aspect of a game that is usually static and shuffles it somehow. In particular, in this paper we will discuss the type of randomizer that shuffles the locations of items in a game where certain key items are needed to traverse the game world and access some of these locations. Examples of these types of games include series such as The Legend of Zelda and Metroid.

In order to accomplish this shuffling in such a way that the player is able to …

Cyber Security Framework For Vehicular Network Based On A Hierarchical Game, Hichem Sedjelmaci, Imane Horiya Brahmi, Nirwan Ansari, Mubashir Husain Rehmani

Publications

The growth of electronic devices in connected vehicles and their connections to the untrusted network, present unprecedented exposure to attacks. Therefore, a reliable and efficient cyber security framework is mandatory to protect vehicular networks against the cyber attackers. Thereby, we propose a cyber defense framework based on a hierarchical cooperative game to secure legitimate vehicles from attacks. In the proposed hierarchical game, there are two kinds of players, the head agent and secondary agents that cooperate between each other to detect, predict and react efficiently against suspected attacks. The Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Intrusion Prediction System (IPS), and Intrusion Reaction …

Investigating The Adoption Of Hybrid Encrypted Cloud Data Deduplication With Game Theory, Xueqin Liang, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng, Qinghu Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Encrypted data deduplication, along with different preferences in data access control, brings the birth of hybrid encrypted cloud data deduplication (H-DEDU for short). However, whether H-DEDU can be successfully deployed in practice has not been seriously investigated. Obviously, the adoption of H-DEDU depends on whether it can bring economic benefits to all stakeholders. But existing economic models of cloud storage fail to support H-DEDU due to complicated interactions among stakeholders. In this article, we establish a formal economic model of H-DEDU by formulating the utilities of all involved stakeholders, i.e., data holders, data owners, and Cloud Storage Providers (CSPs). Then, …

Accessibility: Disabilities Treasure Hunt, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This is a treasure hunt game that simulates various disabilities and gives a sense of how frustrating non-accessible content can be for people with disabilities. Suitable for a general audience, no programming experience necessary.

An editable copy is also given, along with ideas about how to make it more accessible.

Collaborative Game Mosaics, Xiaoyun Gong

Honors Papers

Imagine two players are playing a strategy board game. With one player holding black stones and the other player holding white stones, they take turns to place their pieces. After a while, they start to recognize some patterns. With three colors in front of them, black, white, and the color of the game board, they are curious about if they can form a recognizable image. Instead of playing the game to win, they start to collaborate with each other to form a mosaic. Later, they invite more players and provide them their own stones in different shades of gray. The …

Recreating The Virtual Bullets That Pierces Through The Soul Of Gaming: Video Games And Its Cultural Perception On America’S Violent Homefrontier, Brandon Palomino

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

For the past fifty years, video games have been around as a form of entertainment we consume on a daily basis. Unlike the books and movies seen in pop culture today, video games take us on virtual journeys where people participate in unique gameplay objectives based on player involvement. Because the idea of player engagement was rare at the time, it was inevitable that video games would revolutionize the way we view entertainment onwards. With video games becoming increasingly popular throughout the years, the debate of whether they are truly violent in nature has rubbed many people like myself the …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 6.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joseph Bisz, Christina Boyle, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. These proceedings summarize the CUNY Games Conference 6.0, where scholars shared research findings at a three-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogy in higher education. Presenters could share findings in oral presentations, posters, demos, or play testing sessions. The conference also included workshops on how to modify existing …

Publication And Evaluation Challenges In Games & Interactive Media, Elizabeth L. Lawley

Presentations and other scholarship

Faculty in the fields of games and interactive media face significant challenges in publishing and documenting their scholarly work for evaluation in the tenure and promotion process. These challenges include selecting appropriate publication venues and assigning authorship for works spanning multiple disciplines; archiving and accurately citing collaborative digital projects; and redefining “peer review,” impact, and dissemination in the context of creative digital works. In this paper I describe many of these challenges, and suggest several potential solutions.

Two Games Displayed By Butler’S 2017 Celebration Of Mind, Jeremiah Farrell

Jeremiah Farrell

Jeremiah's two games displayed by Butler's 2017 Celebration of Mind.

Iceland's Migratory Birds In Changing Environmental Conditions: An Interactive Synthesis, Frances J. Duncan

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Human-driven changes to environmental conditions alter the habitats, behaviors, and migration patterns of migratory species. Changes in temperature, vegetation, and precipitation are just some of the factors contributing to shifts in phenology, demography, and distribution of migratory birds. These changes are driven by anthropogenic climate change and amplified by human land-use change, and are especially intense at high latitudes. This project creatively communicates the effects of environmental changes on three species of migratory birds in Iceland—the northern wheatear, the Greenland white-fronted goose, and the black-tailed godwit—using principles of storytelling and game design. The resulting interactive product is a game that …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 5.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Kathleen Offenholley, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm, Anders A. Wallace

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. The CUNY Games Conference distills its best cutting-edge interactive presentations into a two-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogies in higher education, focusing particularly on non-digital learning activities that faculty can use in the classroom every day. The conference will include workshops lead by CUNY Games Organizers on …

Comparing Procedural Content Generation Algorithms For Creating Levels In Video Games, Zina Monaghan

Dissertations

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is used frequently in games to increase replayability by introducing variety to playghrough of a game and reduce development time by allowing complex game worlds to be developed by a smaller team over a more limited amount of time.

Celebration Of Mind Puzzle-Game, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Each different letter of "Celebration of Mind" is used exactly three times in the following words: ACE, BAM, BID, BLT (the sandwich), CON, FEN, FIT, MIC (microphone or 1099), OLD, RAN, ELM, RFD (rural free delivery), ROT.

Quantitative Jeopardy Feud, Jonathan M. Gallimore

MSF 600 PR - Gallimore - Fall 2018

This activity - Quantitative Jeopardy Feud - is a method for using a game as a final exam.

Secondary Data Analysis Project, Jonathan M. Gallimore

SF 420 PR - Gallimore - Fall 2018

This activity is designed to give students an opportunity to apply what they have learned in statistics to a real dataset.

This activity will help students apply what they have learned in statistics to real world data and answer their own research questions. Students will also practice reporting their results in a paper using APA format.