first proposed the concept behind NERO at the 2nd Annual Game Development Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, Interactivity, and Immersive Environments, which was hosted by the Digital Media Collaboratory of the IC2 Institute at UT Austin. I had been thinking about how to make evolution an entertaining part of the video game experience. In particular, I had two nagging questions in mind:
If agents are allowed to evolve during a video game, what prevents them from being wiped out before they achieve a suitable and interesting level of play?
How can we guarantee the game will be interesting when we can't be sure what level of performance the AI will ultimately reach?
After thinking hard about these questions, I came up with the concept of NERO as the solution. I brought it up during a breakout session during the Workshop. In the breakout session, a group of conference attendees discussed and refined the idea, and I then presented the idea to the Workshop at large. The DMC lab took interest and decided to sponsor the idea as a project. More than 20 people are currently involved.