Emote Games To Improve Online Artificial Intelligence With Funding From The Technology Strategy Board
Improved artificial intelligence will provide new opportunities for the online games market
LONDON, UK, October 1st, 2008 – The Technology Strategy Board has awarded almost 600,000 pounds of funding towards a 1.3 million pound artificial intelligence project of which Emote Games is the lead partner.
Emote Games is an online games publisher that specialises in high quality, cross platform, social games and technologies. This style of connected gaming is enhanced with the use of AI Non Player Characters (NPC’s) who can take many forms but essentially facilitate and act as opponents, informants, tutors and counterparts for gamers, contributing to the social cohesion of gaming communities.
The outcome of this project will not only bring about a breakthrough in how online communities are managed, but also create new opportunities to grow the online games market and push growth within the online social networking space.
The Technology Strategy Board funding will help support the development of vastly improved AI controlled social agents that exist within social networks. Working in collaboration with the Imperial College, London, who have expertise in multi-agent systems, constraint solving and machine learning, this best of breed partnership will harness the expertise from the cutting edge of both academia and the games industry.
The project will be managed incrementally, and the technology will be modular, so that more intelligent agent versions are built on top of previous iterations making the project sustainable and commercially viable for a much longer development cycle.
Matt Sansam, Operations Manager, Emote Games said, “The use of NPC’s will become integral to the social cohesion and support of social networks, online games and their communities. At Emote we take gaming further by linking our high quality games and communities with popular social networks. Within these social networks and games new, highly intelligent NPC characters can assist with everything from community integration and community management to new forms of mission, interaction and game play.”
The project will begin November 2008 with the Imperial College becoming involved January 2009.
