P.L.: Interactive evolution for the procedural generation of tracks in a high-end racing game. Interface

We present a framework for the procedural generation of tracks for a high-end car racing game (TORCS) using inter-active evolution. The framework maintains multiple pop-ulations and allow users to work both on their own pop-ulation (in single-user mode) or to collaborate with other users on a shared population. Our architecture comprises a web frontend and an evolutionary backend. The former manages the interaction with users (e.g., logs registered and anonymous users, collects evaluations, provides access to all the evolved populations) and maintains the database server that stores all the present/past populations. The latter runs all the tasks related to evolution (selection, recombination and mutation) and all the tasks related to the target racing game (e.g., the track generation). We performed two sets of experiments involving five human subjects to evolve racing tracks alone (in a single-user mode) or cooperatively. Our preliminary results on five human subjects show that, in all the experiments, there is an increase of users ’ satisfaction as the evolution proceeds. Users stated that they perceived improvements in the quality of the individuals between sub-sequent populations and that, at the end, the process pro-duced interesting tracks