The Institute of Digital Games is thrilled to have Dr Jean-Baptiste Mouret of Inria, the French research institute dedicated to computer science and mathematics, speaking as part of our Game Seminar Series.
The talk entitled, Game AI: Creative artificial evolution through quality diversity algorithms, will be held on 17 May at 16:00 at the Institute of Digital Games.
Evolutionary algorithms are traditionally viewed as effective gradient-free optimisation algorithms. Nevertheless, this optimisation-centric view 'hides' one of the most fascinating aspects of natural evolution: its creativity. In this talk, Dr Mouret will introduce our work on niche-based 'quality diversity' algorithms, which is a new family of evolutionary algorithms designed to find a large, diverse set of high-performing solutions (instead of a single, optimal solution). Dr Mouret will illustrate how these algorithms are more creative designers than traditional evolutionary algorithms using our experiments in robotics (legged locomotion) and in aerodynamic design (velomobiles, airfoils).
About Dr Jean-Baptiste
Dr Jean-Baptiste Mouret is a senior researcher ('Directeur de recherche') at Inria, the French research institute dedicated to computer science and mathematics, and he is currently the principal investigator of an ERC grant (ResiBots – Robots with animal-like resilience, 2015-2020). Overall, J.-B. Mouret conducts researches that intertwine machine learning, robotics, and evolutionary computation to make robots that can adapt as quickly and as creatively as possible. His work was recently featured on the cover of Nature ('Robots that adapt like animals', Cully et al., 2015) and it received several national and international scientific awards, including the 'Prix La Recherche 2016', the 'Distinguished Young Investigator in Artificial Life 2017', and several best paper awards in major conferences of his field. Before joining Inria, he was an assistant professor ('maître de conférences') at the Pierre and Marie Curie University (now Sorbonne Université) in Paris, France (2009-2015).
