If someone was to talk to you about a game learning from the player, you might think back to games which claimed to adjust the difficulty on the fly depending on the players skills.  You might also remember not noticing it having any effect on the game.  In that case, the AI was working against the player, but in Galactic Arms Race, the AI is working with you.  It is a neural net that monitors your usage of weapons and evolves them according to your actions.  All the guns in the game are computer generated, as opposed to having stats coded into the game.  Check it out at Slashdot and head to the games site to grab it and play.

“Just as interest in user-generated content in video games is heating up, a team of researchers at the University of Central Florida has released an experimental multiplayer game in which content items compete with each other in an evolutionary arms race to satisfy the players. As a result, particle system-based weapons, which are the evolving class of content, continually invent their own new behaviors based on what users liked in the past. Does the resulting experience in this game, called Galactic Arms Race, suggest that evolutionary algorithms may be the key to automated content generation in future multiplayer gaming and MMOs?”

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