Physics Simulation Games

Building Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can successfully interact with the physical world in a comprehensive and human-like way is a big challenge. Physics simulation games, i.e., video games where the game world simulates real-world physics, offer a simplified and controlled environment for developing J. Renz (*) • X. Ge Artificial Intelligence Group, Research School of Computer Science, The Australian National University, ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, Canberra, Australia e-mail: [email protected] # Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2015 R. Nakatsu et al. (eds.), Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4560-52-8_29-1 1 and testing Artificial Intelligence. It allows AI researchers to integrate different areas of AI, such as computer vision, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, or automated planning in a realistic setting and to solve various problems that occur in the real world without having to consider all of its complexity at once. This chapter first outlines the main categories of physics simulation games, some of which have become increasingly popular in recent years with the widespread availability of handheld touchscreen devices. It then discusses the motivation and rationale for conducting Artificial Intelligence research on these games and highlights the main research goals. Some of the underlying AI problems and recent advances are discussed and exemplified using a popular physics simulation game. Finally, an overview of current research in related areas is given.