December

The last time we caught up with ANGELINA, Michael Cook's astonishing attempt to build an artificial intelligence that can design its own games, the program had taken a disliking to Theresa May. Cook had given ANGELINA the ability to zip around social networks and the wider internet, learning about people and forming a rudimentary opinion of them. It quickly decided Theresa May was the worst person it had ever heard of - including Bashar al-Assad.

When I visit Cook again in December, ANGELINA's been busy - and it has discovered an unlikely beau. "ANGELINA likes Rupert Murdoch," says Cook, sheepishly. He looks down at the floor and shifts his feet around. "ANGELINA really likes Rupert Murdoch."

The reason for this is quietly instructive. ANGELINA likes Rupert Murdoch because it thinks he's responsible. Good trait, that: responsible parent, responsible boss, responsible economic policy. Who doesn't like responsible people? The problem is that what ANGELINA's actually been reading is that Rupert Murdoch is responsible for things: responsible for the erosion of trust in the press, responsible for the dissemination of poor Fleet Street practices, responsible for a hundred other bits and pieces that people might often take quite a dim view of.

'Some people have just called this a hoax, in which case it's the least impressive hoax of all time.' - Michael Cook.

Love makes us do crazy things, of course, but this latest infatuation highlights a central problem ANGELINA faces when designing its games. It has to deal with the endless nuance of the English language, where one can be responsible per se and also responsible for something very specific. This interpretative blindness is particularly interesting in the light of ANGELINA's latest activities. I've come to see Cook again because his AI is about to enter its first game jam - a design competition in which people make games based around a specific phrase or theme.

Oh, boy.

If you ask me, Cook's one of the most exciting people working anywhere in games at the moment, and a large part of the reason his stuff is so thrilling is because his creative world seems to shift around so quickly. When I first met ANGELINA at Imperial College at the beginning of 2013, it was capable of making 2D platforming games and had just been granted the ability to create its own mechanics - a process that often surprised its own creator.

Since then, Cook's become a researcher at Goldsmiths, and ANGELINA's switched to 3D development. It now builds its games with Unity, one of the most popular design tools available. "There's a lot of extra gumph around it now," says Cook, "but it's also an awkward time: ANGELINA's new incarnation is very bare-bones at the moment."

ANGELINA can still design games and create punning titles, for example (asked to make a game about sheep recently, it came up with Laugh and the Whole World Laughs with Ewe, which is a good day at the office for anybody, I would argue) but the business of coming up with its own mechanics is temporarily out of reach for now. Cook's ultimately giving ANGELINA much more freedom - but that freedom will take time to emerge in full. "ANGELINA's had to take a step back so that it can eventually move forward," is the way Cook puts it. "This means, sadly, that the version of ANGELINA that's going to be entering the game jam is not as sophisticated as I would like."

The game jam in question is Ludum Dare, a regular competition in which designers around the world are all given the same phrase along with a weekend or so to make a game from it. There are actually two tiers of competition - a 48-hour competition, and a 72-hour jam, and it's this latter event that ANGELINA is signing up for, since the AI doesn't make any of its own assets, and Cook wanted to give himself time to make sure nothing goes awry. Crucially, both competitions share a theme, though - and the theme for Ludum Dare 28 is You Only Get One.

Alongside shepherding ANGELINA through its first jam, Cook's entering the 48 hour competition by himself, too, and his game, Lost in Transmission, is a beauty. It casts you as a malfunctioning space probe working on an Earth orbiter. Something's gone badly wrong, and you have to steer the probe through a series of mazes towards the exit - but you can only give it each directional command - up, down, left and right - once each level.

Lost in Transmission is great - you should play it!

Beyond the elegant delivery, it's just a lovely concept - and it highlights, rather succinctly, the problems that ANGELINA faces. "This is what makes me almost angry," says Cook. "It's so trivial for humans to come up with ideas for things. When the theme was announced this time, my wife was working behind me and we started listing ideas. We said, "You could do this, you could do that," and then I said, "You could have it so you can only press each button once," and then that was it. It took me 15 seconds to come up with an idea for my game, and that just makes me so angry. People have thrown away ideas that are better than the best idea ANGELINA can ever come up with."

And humans aren't just good at coming up with ideas, either. It's also a simple process for them to contextualise them meaningfully. "If you can only press each button once, what does that sound like a good fit for?" continues Cook. "Well it sounds like a malfunction - maybe a robot being given instructions. This right here - the gap between mechanic and context - is a big problem for ANGELINA. I immediately made the connection between sending instructions, and then you get to a robot, you get to space stations. And then you know that you want extra mechanics, so an idea for a device that refreshes the last action you took? Well I've watched Star Trek, so I even have a pretty good idea of what that should look like, right?"

Meanwhile, ANGELINA's main strengths at the moment are in selecting theme-appropriate visuals and sound effects, which it then layers onto fairly standardised 3D maze games. You move around, avoiding enemies and sometimes collecting trinkets, as you hunt for the exit. These kind of creative restrictions make a theme like, You Only Get One very difficult for the AI, inevitably. It can't parse phrases, so it has to look at each word in turn when coming up with its ideas - and the only really viable word in this particular phrase is one.

Even this isn't particularly promising. "One is a pretty useless word," says Cook. "It's useless because it's too common. ANGELINA can work out it's too common, because ANGELINA uses a corpus of the English language, and it asks it how many times the word one can occur. To give you some context, the word bridesmaid occurs about 150 times in this corpus. The word one occurs 240,000 times. There's a cut-off that says if the word appears more than a certain number of times you can't use it as a theme. Instead, you have to look for - and I coined this phrase two weeks ago - second-order themes. You look for words associated with the original word, and you use one of those for a theme instead.

"And still, even at this point, one is still a terrible theme for ANGELINA. And the associations that ANGELINA finds for one are just bizarre." Cook laughs. "One of them is teaspoon. You know, as in having one teaspoon. That's a viable theme, apparently."

Regardless, as soon as the theme was announced, emboldened by its second-order selection, ANGELINA immediately leapt into action and started making a game about tequila. "I didn't get it either," admits Cook. "Apparently there's a song that says, "One tequila, two tequila"?" It doesn't matter, sadly. ANGELINA then crashed, and the tequila game was lost forever.

In its place we get To That Sect - a pun, potentially, on the phrase To That Effect. This time, we're in for a game concerning… founders.

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"This is a game about a disgruntled child. A founder," writes ANGELINA in the commentary it constructs for each of its games - a commentary that hopefully helps explain what it's done and, more importantly, what it's done intentionally. "The game has only one level and the objective is to reach the exit. Along the way you must avoid the vessel… Using Google and a tool called Metaphor Magnet, I discovered that people feel charmed by founders sometimes, so I chose an unnerving piece of music to complement the game's mood."

As ANGELINA itself might have just suggested, To That Sect is a strange work. You navigate a maze with red walls, avoiding little silver people and collecting - and I can't believe I am typing this - cross-channel ferries. Cook and I puzzle over the whole thing for some time, and eventually elements start to make sense.

Founders, then: there's an obvious link to one there - or at least to the idea of being first at something. By the looks of it, ANGELINA's become preoccupied with a certain kind of founder, though - the founder of a cult. That explains the idea that people are "charmed" by founders, and perhaps the part about disgruntled children, too. (Metaphor Magnet, where the disgruntled children came from, is a piece of software that mines google's corpus of the English language to find metaphoric descriptions; it turns up a lot of phrases that sound like this.)

It looks a bit like the Black Lodge, if you ask me.

As for the cross-channel ferries? This one takes Cook a while to work out, and it comes down to the fact that there's more than one definition of founder. Boats can founder, too. This is nothing to do with the idea of one perhaps, but you can't fault ANGELINA's rather other-worldly logic, at least. Unravelling the AI's thinking - even when it's tried to explain its thinking to you directly - is a bit like solving a cryptic crossword clue. A cryptic crossword clue set by a precocious child who's read a lot, understood almost none of it, and has never seen the real world before.

"So, that was pretty bizarre," says Cook after we've finished playing through To That Sect. "As a game on its own, this isn't terrible, and if you're thinking of it as a game about cults and sects, it' works quite well. Unintentionally, perhaps. The tall figures it's placed around the map are quite imposing, even if they don't feel relevant. But the music definitely does, and you've also got this justification: ANGELINA chose the music on purpose. ANGELINA's gone from founders to people being charmed to an unnerving piece of music, and she's told us she's done it on purpose." He leans back in his chair. "One of the rating categories for Ludum Dare, is theme. I'm not holding out much hope, but that's our best shot."

So to recap, then: Cook's entered Ludum Dare 28 himself and he's quickly came up with a clever and original puzzle game that ties beautifully into the competition's theme. ANGELINA, meanwhile, has made a confusing maze-escape challenge with bright red walls and a bunch of ferries knocking about. And that's it?

Not quite. ANGELINA's also made a secret second game - a control game called Stretch Bouquet Point, which will be entered into the jam pseudonymously. And Stretch Bouquet Point is out there. For some reason, it takes the idea of bridesmaids as its theme for exploring the idea of one, and it offers another maze (there's nothing to collect this time) filled with deadly bridesmaids wobbling about as you try to get the exit. Meanwhile, some particularly intrusive chanting - it's a form of wedding blessing by an African griot apparently - dominates the soundtrack.

You have to hear it to truly experience this game.

There are plenty of questions here, but the most important one lies outside the game entirely. If Stretch Bouquet Point's a control, what's the experiment?

"Let's be absolutely clear, this was not an attempt to do a Turing style test," says Cook. "We're really against that in our group at Goldsmiths. One of the reasons is that we don't really believe it's possible to look at a piece of art created by a computer and view it in the same way you'd view a human-created artifact. Once you know it's made by a computer, it doesn't matter if it's perfect or if it's exactly the same as something created by a human - you're viewing it in a whole different way.

"The real reason for the control was that, for a long time, I've suspected that there's bias when dealing with ANGELINA," he continues. "This wouldn't surprise anybody who works in computational creativity. What would surprise them is that I think it's positive bias rather than negative bias.

"Most people react negatively to creative software, I think - particularly in old media. Fine art, poetry, music. things that are considered high culture in particular. A lot of the people there are less than welcoming. In games it's almost the opposite, and I think it's because gamers are already accustomed to technology and artificial intelligence and generation. It's part of the culture."

But bias is still bias. "It's interesting to see when it exists and it's interesting to know about it," argues Cook. "Having ANGELINA be too praised for something is as bad as it being artificially prejudiced against. So the idea was, let's submit two games to Ludum Dare, and let's see if there's a difference in the ratings. But also, let's see if there's a difference in the way that people respond to them. So ANGELINA will be entering twice. The first entry will be public and will include text by me saying that this is by a piece of software, but please rate it as you would normally. And the second will be slipped quietly into the competition."

And what result is Cook anticipating? "What I expect we'll see is that people rank the first entry much higher than the anonymised one. The fear is that one person will end up reviewing both games and will realise and maybe even tell everyone else. I don't think that's terribly likely to happen. But it's still possible."