Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children May/June 2015

Ever competed against a magazine? Well, Muse hereby challenges you to a game of Get to Six. We’ll play as you read this article—this is how The first player (you, as promised) starts by choosing either the number 1 or the number 2. Then the second player +Muse) will choose 1 or 2. We’ll add our choice to yours to get a total. Then you and Muse will continue to take turns picking 1 or 2. Each choice will be added to the total. The player who first gets the total to equal wins. Ready? For your first turn, do you choose 1 or 2? Fair Warning This game of Get to Six isn’t just a pleasant pastime between old friends. It’s also a demonstration of basic game theory. Game…

Alight beam skims the surface of a table strewn with geometrical objects. As the glowing bar passes over each object in turn, you hear eerie sounds related to the shape and placement of the object. You can even create your own weird music by shifting the rectangles, circles, and other everyday shapes into new positions. Golan Levin, an artist at Carnegie Mellon University, created this audiovisual installation. He calls it “Scrapple.” Levin’s system is essentially a scanner that reads and interprets the positions and shapes of objects. It works a bit like a musician converting the notes he or she sees on a sheet of music into a sequence of sounds. In this case, the table and its objects are not only the score but also a musical instrument. In…

You’re at home, doing push-ups on the living room floor. Each time you lift your body upwards, a small device in your pocket records the movement. Your physical activity is building up virtual points on a website called Zamzee. If you get enough, you can trade them in for real prizes. Zamzee is part of a business trend called gamification. “The basic idea of gamification is that you take something that’s not fun, and you make it fun,” says Dan Botwinick, Zamzee’s vice president of marketing. Zamzee and other gamified businesses borrow techniques from games—like competition and rewards for high scores—to make tasks like exercising as much fun as playing. Head Games Gamification can help motivate people to do activities that are usually boring or frustrating. Think of learning a…

A ghost chases you through a maze. Chomp that energy pill, Pac-Man! Whew, the ghost ran off. How do ghosts in “Pac-Man” and other game characters know when to chase and when to flee? They’re smart! Well, no, but they do have a form of artificial intelligence (AI). A programmer wrote computer code, or a set of rules, to act as their brains. Game AI code tells characters where to go and what to do based on what’s happening in the game. These characters have to act smart—but the game also has to be fun. When developers find just the right mix of fun and brains, you get game heaven. Ready, Set, Change State! AI programmers use many different methods to bring game characters to life. A finite state machine…

Artificial intelligence isn’t Just for game characters. In “The Flame in the Flood,” the main character travels on a raft down a river. Damian Isla programmed the river using A techniques. Instead of drawing the entire river, his team wrote code that allows the river to create itself—it flows forever, and it’s different every time you play. As the player floats downstream, the code plops down random riverbanks and islands. These pieces then move around, adjusting themselves to fit a set of rules. The rules define things like how far apart the islands have to be. This type of A is called procedural content generation (PCN). A procedure (code) continually creates content (the river). “The most fun I’ve had on this project so far is working on the river, says…

Damian Isla is a cofounder and software engineer at The Molasses Flood, an independent video game company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously he worred as an artificial intelligence (AI) programmer on the games “Halo 2,” “Halo 3,” “BioShoc Infinite,” and “Destiny.” Q Did you dream of working on video games when you were young? A I knew that I wanted to work on games, and then when I got a little bit older, I thought games were for kids. I wanted to go work for NASA! Q What changed your mind? A I looked at what I had done for my Master’s thesis [in computer science], and I thought that it looked a lot like a game already. On top of that, games were a fantastic way to combine both sides…