Exploiting the Fascination: Video Games in Machine Learning Research and Education

Present day video games offer interesting perspective for computer science research and eduction. As the first generation in history that grew up playing computer games is gradually moving from being students to being teachers, we are now witnessing a growing number of scientific publications and university courses dealing with games. In this contribution, we will report on both these aspects. By means of the problem of behaviour modelling for game characters, we will outline the potential of modern commercial games for research in subsymbolic machine learning. Using the network traffic of multiplayer games as input for our algorithms, we will present results obtained with different neural network architectures. Finally, we also shall point out the benefits of video games in teaching machine learning materials and report on first encouraging experiences with computer games in undergraduate education.