Evolving the infinite game

The “Infinite Game” is a game whose purpose is to never end. In other words, a successful game is one that does not end and if it does, you lose. It was brought up in the context of evolution and technology. Furthermore, the concept brings about not just that the game does not end, but that the game increases in diversity, complexity and specialization, just like evolution and technology. In other words, the game’s purpose is to have more of it on any “complexity”-dimension.

Another ingenious idea, by Schmidhuber, is the concept of evolving the rules of the game such that it will be enjoyable. The novelty here is the definition of what is an enjoyable game. According to Schmidhuber’s theory of fun, an enjoyable game is one that is learnable, i.e. that it is hard to learn but feasible to learn. He then evolves the rules of the game such that learnability is increased, as measured by how long it takes for a simulated player (a neural network) to learn the game.

Let us combine the two ideas. Now we want to evolve a game whose purpose is to never end, and yet for it to be enjoyable. This means that the rules must not only evolve but also change with time, otherwise it will not be an “infinite game”. Hence, the evolution will have to take care of comparing the rate of learnability, i.e. how fast can one learn the rules and understand the game in order to advance, and the rate of rules’ change, i.e. how fast do the rules change such that a good player becomes not so good again.

This concept of evolving a game to be both fun and never ending leaves out an obvious concept of games: actual winning. Here, as in Schmidhuber idea, the game can end and can be “won”. But now, the game’s desire, not the player’s, is for it to not end. There is thus a balance between the player’s goal of ending the game and winning and the game’s goal to continue and challenge the player.

If evolved correctly, this can result in a rule for how rules change. In a more complex setting, this rule can be related to the progress of the player, her learnability and her adaptation to the very rule that changes the game. Yep, this is a circular thing that can go into your head, but create super cool games!