Speeding Up Evaluation of Structures for the Angry Birds Game

In this work, we present an original method based on evolutionary algorithms for generating basic structures for the physics-based game Angry Birds, with the ultimate objective of creating Angry Birds levels with the minimum number of constraints. We set out to evolve free-form structures, and this means searching in a larger space. In this paper, we test how using a physics engine enables us to evaluate much more levels than a game engine simulation. In order to do this, we compare the results of experiments using both types of simulators and propose fitness functions accordingly. Results show the execution time drastically drops from 5 hours to less than 20 minutes on average.