Andy Wang, AGPM '18, has been chosen as one of the recipients of the Koret Scholarship for 2018. Andy and his graduate student mentor, Joseph C. Osborne, will be working on Libretro. The Koret Scholarship provides $1,500 to support undergraduate research and a $2,000 fellowship for the mentor of the project.
Wang and Osborne describe their research below:
There is a wealth game design ideas and decisions found from video game to video game, and we want to tap into that pool of information with our project, titled "desAI." We are building a base on top of Libretro, an emulator library that offers us access to a lot of virtual game consoles. That is, our program will be able to run any game found on the NES, N64, Playstation One, PSP, Atari 2600, Nintendo DS, or whatever future platform is added to Libretro's library. From there, the program will interact with the game by sending virtual controller inputs to navigate menus or control the player character. DesAI will also export a screenshot of the game's current state every few frames.