Angry Birds on Chrome + evolution = WIN!!

So Angry Birds is now available in a Javascript port on Chrome. I have yet to really study it beyond, you know, playing it for a couple of days to see what all the fuss is about (and yeah, it's a pretty addictive game!) So I had this cool idea, as one does.

Back when tower defense games were all the rage, I spent a little time developing some tools to play tower defense for me. It was more challenging than it sounds - but only because TD games are all in Flash, and Flash has no machine-accessible output or state beyond its actual screen output. Screen capture is slow. So actually responding to screen output is essentially impossible. (Not to mention the shocking dearth of easy-to-use OCR libraries, which seems still not to have been resolved - and it's 2011!)

Anyway, the description of a level is presumably in a nice little string. That string could be evolved with a GA - making new levels that people could play in a Web2.0 fashion, providing grist for the evolution! But that would require a lot of people.

So why not evolve playing strategies as well? This would consist of a list of pullback coordinates and delays. The ease with which a given population could evolve a playing strategy would allow the calculation of a "playability metric" - and that in turn would be an evolutionary metric for the new levels.

So by harnessing two levels of evolution, you could (maybe) generate an arbitrary number of entertaining Angry Birds levels.

Cool, huh?