Overcooked, an immersive multiplayer video game centered around cooperative cooking challenges, provides the roots for this research project. The study focuses on designing and evaluating a hand-authored controller in comparison to controllers implemented using various machine learning techniques, such as Population Based Training, in the context of a simplified version of the game. The main objective is to assess the cooperation between the hand-authored controller and a human controlled agent, with a particular emphasis on the coordination and minimizing errors during runs of fixed time length. A testing method has been designed in order to more accurately evaluate the performance. Through the implementation of a specialized controller utilizing techniques such as Behavior Trees and Decision Trees, the controller was able to successfully accomplish the task of delivering soups. An analysis was made to examine the performance of the hand-authored controller in comparison to the results obtained in other research papers that use the same simplified version of the game. After the results have been obtained, a clear difference was visible. The scripted AI performed better when paired with himself than one created with population based training that was paired with himself. However, the scripted AI was not better than a coupled planning algorithm that was paired with himself, but the computations were easier and faster for the scripted AI. When paired with a human, the overall performance decreases, but increases only for one specific map.

Cooperative AI is AI designed to cooperate with humans. One example of such an AI, made using planning algorithms, was studied in a paper from 2019 which used a simplified version of the video game Overcooked for evaluation. However, only limited evaluations were possible due to the long runtime and heuristic optimisations made. This paper will attempt to increase the amount of evaluations while removing an important optimisation limiting the functionality of the AI: the omission of counters. In the end it will find ways of reducing the runtime and increasing performance, which together allow for the addition of counters in a few instances. The final results with counters suggest there is more to gain upon removal of a select few heuristic optimisations and improvement of the human behavioural clone used to simulate a human.

During a viral infection, we expel remnants of the virus. This makes it possible to conduct wastewater analysis which aid in the efforts to track the evolution of the current Covid-19 pandemic. It has been shown that by repurposing the kallisto algorithm, the abundance of SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater samples can be estimated. Since this is a novel method for this scope, its precision could probably be improved by adjusting certain aspects. In this work, I look at one of those aspects: sequencing particular genomic regions of the virus rather than the entire genome. I have indeed found that the regions that code for the spike (S) and nucleocapsid (N) regions and a section around the region coding for the non-structural protein 3 (nsp3) give particularly accurate results when sequenced on their own. In addition, in at least one case, combining two well-performing regions further improves accuracy at lower simulated abundances of variants. This suggests that sequencing depth is preferred over sequencing breath as long as the region being sequenced contains enough information to distinguish between variants. These findings are important as they can aid in the improvement of this method of variant quantification. Moreover, they can also help in improving other algorithms applied to the SARS-CoV-2 genome by highlighting the genomic sections containing the most differentiating information between variants.

The Internet consists of many subnetworks, which are connected to each other. These subnetworks are the autonomous systems (ASes) that make up the Internet: each hosts a part of it. In order to successfully determine routes from one of these ASes to the other, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is used. This protocol has several security flaws however, and exploitation of them has lead to parts of the Internet being temporarily unreachable. In order to combat these flaws, several security solutions have been developed already. However, none of these have been deployed on a wide scale yet. As such, this thesis focuses on the question: why not, and what can be done to protect BGP in the future? This thesis includes an analysis of the BGP threat landscape, to find which threats are most relevant, and to find out whether or not solutions have adapted to the threat landscape. It also includes a comparison of solutions on different practical security aspects. From this comparison, I found that no solution is able to prevent attacks if only one autonomous system deploys it. Due to this, I suggest to shift attention to detective security. This thesis also includes an analysis of some detective security schemes, to see which properties of these schemes can be used for a new scheme. This new scheme is designed to comply with a list of requirements, and it uses properties from three other schemes. Development of this scheme is left as future work. Altogether, this thesis should provide a new direction for the future of BGP security.

Procedural content generation (PCG) for architecture is widely used in a variety of digital media, most notably in games. However, such methods are often limited in their expressive range, and require considerable technical knowledge to create non-trivial architectural structures. We present a novel tile-based PCG approach for generating architecture, that proposes the use of architectural profiles, a declarative characterization of architectural typology, within a generic tile solving framework. An architectural profile consists of a set of tiles, representing atomic architectural building blocks, and a set of declarative constraints and rules, specifying which conditions a tile configuration has to satisfy to be valid. These conditions are translated into logic constraints, and used by a tile solver to control tile placement in a bottom-up manner. Eventually, each valid model output by the solver is a representative instance of its architectural profile. We describe an implementation of this approach with Answer Set Programming, using an off-the-shelf constraint solver for model generation. We performed an expressive range analysis, and concluded that our declarative method is quite controllable and can be steered over a broad range of architectural structures, regarding density and repetitiveness. Due to this expressive range and control, our tile-based method is very suitable for the customized development of urban environments for games. We also explore the adaptability of architectural profiles by application on pre-existing terrains.

The use of tangential vector fields and thus the need for designing them has steadily been increasing over the years. In this master thesis, a method is proposed and implemented that defines localized tangential vector fields on a mesh surface, which allows for the designing of vector fields on the triangulated surfaces of these meshes. Similarly, as with 2D radial basis functions for function values, it is possible to accurately approximate, compress and design vector fields using the localized tangential vector fields with an applied radial basis function scalar. The proposed system constructs multiple localized tangential vector fields on the surface and creates a basis from them that covers the entire surface. Other works have already suggested methods for the designing of tangential vector fields but most did not allow for both soft and hard constraints to be used when designing fields in real-time. One approach was able to design fields in real-time but had the bottleneck that it required a lot of precomputation time as it was using spectral processing techniques and a spectral transform to work in the spectral representation. Using the proposed localized tangential vector fields basis in this work also allows for the real-time modeling of tangential vector fields without to much precomputation time. However, it should be noted to fully optimize the proposed system several improvements on the current techniques used in this work have to be made to compete with the spectral representation. The proposed system is the first to our knowledge that uses localized tangential vector fields on meshes for the designing of tangential vector fields.