John Asaro

I am a senior at Connecticut College, double majoring in Computer Science and Psychology. I have experience in software development and research, with the majority of my recent projects being done in collaboration with the Autonomous Agent Learning Lab, of which I am a part of. Hopefully you are interested in some of my work, including both my published research and unpublished research projects.

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Research

My research is heavily focused on developing AI agents to solve problems. These problems include completing tasks or optimizing towards a goal, for example training agents to play the games XPilot, DOOM, and Ikemen-GO, and using evolutionary algorithms to generate hexapod gaits. In the past, I have also worked with Dr. Christine Chung in the field of computational social choice.

The Core is a unique competitive co-evolution algorithm that allows agents to evolve autonomous control without utilizing a traditional fitness function. The agents evolve via local interactions through tour- nament selection, crossover, and mutation, producing offspring by evolv- ing better controllers. Previous works have shown The Core’s ability to evolve agents capable of combat and navigation in the Xpilot video game. This research expands upon that premise by niching agents to specific subsets of the original environment The Core was tested in. Our results demonstrate the niched agents capacity for success over agents niched to the entire system and agents niched to different sub-environments.

Inspired by Jon Barrons' website.