Controlling Crowd Simulations using Neuro-Evolution

Wang, Sunrise and Gain, James and Nitschke, Geoff (2015) Controlling Crowd Simulations using Neuro-Evolution, Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2015), Madrid, Spain, 353-360, ACM Press.

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Abstract

Crowd simulations have become increasingly popular in films over the last decade, appearing in large crowd shots of many big name block-buster films. An important requirement for crowd simulations in films is that they should be directable both at a high and low level. As agent-based techniques allow for low-level directability and more believable crowds, they are typically used in this field. However, due to the bottom-up nature of these techniques, to achieve high level directability, agent-level parameters must be adjusted until the desired crowd behavior emerges. As manually adjusting parameters is a time consuming and tedious process, this paper investigates a method for automating this, using Neuro-Evolution. To this end, the Conventional Neuro-Evolution (CNE), Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Strategy (CMA-ES), Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), and Enforced Sub Populations (ESP) algorithms are compared across a variety of representative crowd simulation scenarios. Overall, it was found that CMA-ES generally performs the best across the selected simulations.

Item Type: Conference paper
Subjects: Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence
Date Deposited: 23 Nov 2017
Last Modified: 10 Oct 2019 15:32
URI: http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1200

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