The Very Hungry Researcher: Form and Function in Procgen Research, Ross Mawhorter
Amii Intelligence16 June 2026Watch on YouTube
Description
The AI Seminar is a weekly meeting at the University of Alberta where researchers interested in artificial intelligence (AI) can share their research. Presenters include both local speakers from the University of Alberta and visitors from other institutions. Topics can be related in any way to artificial intelligence, from foundational theoretical work to innovative applications of AI techniques to new fields and problems. In this seminar from the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and the Department of Computing Science, Dr. Ross Mawhorter explains the tenuous relationship between form and function in videogame design. He will demonstrate how this in turn leads to flaws in the methods for procedural level design, and he will describe some possible ways forward. Bio: Ross Mawhorter is a recent PhD graduate from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His passion for research led him to abandon sunny California for the frozen north as a postdoc in Matthew Guzdial's GRAIL lab. He studies procgen, working in his free time on generating Super Metroid ROMhacks. Along with procedural level design, his academic interests include complexity theory and cophylogeny.
What you'll learn
- Procedural level generation in videogames has methodological problems in the relationship between form (how levels look) and function (how they play).
- Dr. Mawhorter demonstrates how flaws in game design are present in the way procedural level design is studied and evaluated.
- The research focuses on practical ways to better understand and apply procedural generation in game development.