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Category Archives: Academics

Starcraft EISbot in GamePro

By Chris Lewis | Published: April 14, 2010

Continuing the EIS blog’s recent Starcraft theme, Ben and Peter were recently interviewed by John Davison, editor of Gamepro, inspired after his visit to UCSC. The interview is now up on the front-page of Gamepro.com, with Davison tweeting: “Mind blown.”

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Dan Kline from Crystal Dynamics Visits UCSC

By Sherol Chen | Published: April 14, 2010

Thursday, April 15, 2010 11 am -12 pm E2-280 Hosted by Associate Professor Michael Mateas Speaker: Daniel Kline from Crystal Dynamics Title: How You Can Make A Great Game In this talk, we’ll explore how anyone can make a great game.  We’ll investigate what separates a good game from a great game, delving into the […]

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Achieving the ELIZA Effect in StarCraft

By Ben Weber | Published: April 10, 2010

One of my research goals is to build an agent that mimics human gameplay. To achieve this challenging goal, I have implemented chat functionality in EISBot. Once every thirty seconds, EISBot randomly selects a message from a pool of 75 messages and sends it to the console. The results can be quite convincing:

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Steven Dow visits UCSC

By Serdar Sali | Published: April 4, 2010

Steven Dow (Ph.D., Postdoctural Scholar, Stanford University) is giving two talks at UCSC on Monday, April 5. “How Prototyping Practices Affect Design Results” Time: 11:00 am Place: E2 – 280 Abstract: Design shapes the world we inhabit, both digital and physical. Yet surprisingly often, the design process fails to uncover the real needs and desires of […]

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Beyond the Screen, Reading Moving Letters, and more!

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: March 26, 2010

I have lots of book news to share. The quick news is that Kotaku’s running an excerpt from Expressive Processing and MIT Press has now published a paperback of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media — taking the price down to around $15 at online booksellers. The bigger news is two […]

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Play the EISBot

By Ben Weber | Published: March 19, 2010

Play against the EISBot! Download here: http://eis.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/eisbot.zip So far, I’ve tested the bot versus the avid StarCraft fanbase. It pulls out a 10% win rate versus hardcore gamers.  Can you beat it? Play it and send me the replay!!! Note: playing against the EISBot requires two machines capable of playing StarCraft.

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