Click here for a full description of the series.

There are two tiers of tickets - one for in-person attendance at the Chicago Game Lab and a second for virtual attendance via Discord. In-person attendance is free but limited and will be capped once it's sold out.

Writing software typically means telling the computer exactly what steps to take - and then when we change our minds (as we often do in game development), rewriting those steps, over and over again. But what if we didn't have to? What if we could tell the computer what end result we want, and have it figure out the rest?

Declarative programming is a family of classic AI techniques for doing just that. Declarative programs specify what a solution to the problem would look like, rather than how to find one, and this description is then fed to a very general algorithm (a “solver”) that can solve a wide range of problems given their descriptions. Constraint programming, logic programming, and automated planning are all examples of declarative programming.

Talk 1:
Constraint programming. Introduction to constraint solvers, a classic tool for PCG. 
We will discuss how various games use constraint solvers (for example: wave function collapse) and their characteristics. 
Demo: Imaginarium.


Speaker:
Ian Horswill is an AI researcher and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. He develops game AI tools and techniques for developers and researchers alike. His recent work includes TED, a logic programming language for large scale simulation, and Step, a highly expressive text generation language.