2021 Volume 12 Issue 3 Pages 112-124
The Evolutionary Computation Competition (EC-Comp) is an optimization competition launched in 2017 to promote real-world applications of evolutionary computation and interaction between industry and academia. For 2017—2019, the competition has focused on continuous optimization problems in the manufacturing and aerospace industries. With the aim of exploring new areas of applications, EC-Comp2020 focused on "Designing Random Numbers to Entertain Game Players" in the game industry. Random numbers used in video games are usually generated by general-purpose pseudo random number generators, such as Mersenne Twister and Xorshift. However, these mathematically unbiased random numbers often make game players feel biased (sometimes even deliberately chosen), causing strong frustration. It is known that humans have various biases toward probabilistic events, and unbiased random numbers seem rather biased to game players. This competition asked to design a random number sequence that makes game players feel unbiased (but actually biased). This paper describes the definition of the random number design problem for entertaining game players in EC-Comp2020. This paper also explains the participants' optimization methods, accompanied with brief analysis on their results.
