[PlanetKR] Angry Birds AI Challenge: Call for Participation

[Jochen Renz]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION


AI 2012 Angry Birds Challenge
December 4-5, Sydney, Australia
http://ai2012.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/abc.html

Angry Birds is a popular video game where the task is to shoot birds
with different properties from a sling shot at a structure that houses
pigs and to destroy the pigs. The structure can be very complicated and
can involve a number of different object categories with different
properties. The game and the structure observes the laws of physics and
it is possible to infer how the structure will change when hit at a
certain position.

The task of this Challenge is to develop an Angry Birds playing agent
that is able to successfully play the game autonomously and without
human intervention. This may require analysing the structure of the
objects and to infer how to shoot the birds in order to destroy the pigs
and to score most points. In order to successfully solve this challenge,
participants can benefit from combining different areas of AI such as
computer vision, knowledge representation and reasoning, planning, and
machine learning. Successfully integrating methods from these different
areas is one of the great challenges of AI.

Since it cannot be expected that participants can develop all these
capabilities themselves, the organizers will provide a basic game
playing framework to registered participants that requires Java 6 and 
Matlab and includes the following components:

- a computer vision component that can analyse a video game frame and
returns the location, category and bounding box of all relevant objects
plus the game score
- a trajectory learning component that learns trajectories of birds and
computes where to shoot from in order to hit the given location
- a game playing component that executes actions and captures screen shots

Participants are free to use these components or can develop their own
components. Note that there is a small amount of uncertainty in the
output that the supplied components produce and participants should take
this into account when developing their programs.

The Challenge

The AI'12 Angry Birds challenge is designed to test the abilities of
Angry Birds playing agents on a variety of Angry Birds levels. The
challenge will consist of two tracks: a classic track and an unlimited
track. For both tracks, participating game playing agents will be run by
the organisers on our agent server to ensure autonomous play without
human intervention.

In the classic track, agents will receive screen shots of the game
before and after every action from our game server and are asked to
submit their actions (=coordinates of where to release the next bird and
when to tap) to our game server. These actions will then be executed by
our game server.

In the unlimited track, agents can access the Angry Birds game directly
on our agent server, but are still required to submit their actions to
our game server where they will be executed.

For both tracks there will be a qualification round and the main
challenge. In the qualification round on 4 December, entrants will play
several different game levels and need to demonstrate game playing
capabilities that are more advanced than the test mode of our game
playing framework in order to qualify for the main challenge. The
strategy of the test mode is to shoot birds directly at the pigs without
any analysis of the game scenario other than detecting the locations of
pigs, birds and slingshot.

On 5 December, the qualified Angry Birds game playing agents in each
track will have one hour each to play up to ten Angry Birds levels
automatically and without any human intervention. A new level can only
be accessed once the previous level has been solved. The entrants to
achieve the highest combined game score over the ten levels in each
track will be the winners of the challenge.


Eligibility

The challenge is open to all registered participants who submit a
working Angry Birds game playing program to the organisers by November
30. Each submission needs to be accompanied by a brief description of
how the agent is an improvement over the available basic game playing
framework.

Attending the main conference is not required for participating in the
challenge. Remote participation will be possible, provided that
participants have tested by November 30 that their game playing agents
run on our agent server.

Final versions of the game playing agents need to be submitted to the
organisers 3 hours before the start of the qualification and the challenge.

Participants are required to register by email with subject line "Angry
Birds Registration" to jochen.renz at anu.edu.au by 26 November 12.
Registration should include the following information:
         Team name
         Affiliation
         Team contact person
         Team member names
         Team contact details
         Challenge track (classic and/or unlimited)
         Remote participation or personal attendance


Organisers

Jochen Renz 		The Australian National University
Stephen Gould   	The Australian National University
Charles Gretton 	The Australian National University
Patrik Haslum 		The Australian National University


Important Dates

Registration:
     26 November 2012
Qualification:
     4 December 2012, 2pm - 4pm AEDT
Main challenge:
     5 December 2012, 2pm - 5pm AEDT