Computers Play Chess, Computers Play Go; Humans Play Dungeons & Dragons [prospective]

• Ellis, S., & Hendler, J. (2017). Computers Play Chess, Computers Play Go; Humans Play Dungeons & Dragons. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 32(4), 31–34. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2017.3121545 
• Ellis, S. (2016). Cognitive gameplaying: playing games with cognitive computing (PhD Dept. of Computer Science). Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. 
• Lightning talk video  

Simon Ellis shares his long term goal: making a computer AI able to play D&D. He talks about it very shortly in the magazine article (2017) and in the lightning talk.

At the end of his PhD thesis (2016), he gives more details about "Ariel", an AI agent able to play D&D:

« Such plot and character-driven games require players to have a large amount of specialised knowledge, to draw new inferences and regularly reevaluate existing ones; players must ideally have a 'sense of "self"' regarding the fictional character they are playing and how they would react in given circumstances, and also be able to function as a member of a party. I believe that developing an artificial character to role-play well represents a supreme challenge in the field of AI research; I further believe that, when created, it would by necessity be perhaps the closest to an artificial generally intelligent system ever developed (p.120) [follows a short list of different types of complex interrelated systems]»