INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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Doom has been a popular first-person shooter for the past 25 years
An artificial intelligence network has designed new levels for the original Doom video game.The technique could be used to create future
video games, more quickly and less expensively, researchers said.The AI was "trained" to make new levels by showing it human-designed ones
for the popular first-person shooter.There are large numbers of Doom levels - both official and player-created - freely available online,
providing a rich vein of data.Doom was released in 1993 and is considered to be a major milestone in video games history.Researchers at the
Politecnico di Milano in Italy used a deep-learning technique known as a generative adversarial network (Gan).Two neural networks - one
known as the generator and one as the discriminator - were pitted against each other, with the first attempting to trick the second.The
researchers used data from 1,000 officially created Doom levels and 9,000 levels created by the wider gaming community in order to teach the
AI.They generated a set of images from each level to show the AI the walkable area, walls, floor height, objects and room segmentation
They also fed it information that described the level, including size, length of the perimeter and number of rooms.It took 36,000 iterations
for the networks to generate something playable."Our results show that Gans can capture intrinsic structure of Doom levels and appear to be
a promising approach to level generation in first person shooter games," said lead researcher Edoardo Giacomello.But, he added, there would
still be room for human input."The human designers can focus on high-level features," he added.Researchers from the University of California
have developed a similar approach to build new levels for the Super Mario game.Both are currently prototypes and are not available for
