It’s that time of the year again… the word spreads, I download it, and my nights fly by. It’s time for the new Google AI Challenge: http://aichallenge.org/ ! This time we will be writing multi-agent systems, as we program cyber-ant-colonies fighting against each other for bread crumbs.
I wanted to learn javascript and wrote a small game with an old school look using textareas, that I’m glad to share: Writing javascript is quite intuitive for a Python developer, even though I’m sure that there are many idioms and tricks that I did not know about (and the code I wrote is the [...]
Some computer games offer the possibility to extend their Artificial Intelligence with external scripts, or are explicitly designed to be played by bots. Such games are a great resource to develop, test, and teach AI algorithms. I have been looking for a list of this kind of games, but could find very little information, often [...]
Perhaps inspired by the victory of the artificial brain Watson against humanity, the New York Times is offering today an interactive feature that allows to play a series of Rock-Paper-Scissors games against the computer. The prediction algorithm seems to be a simple Bayesian estimator like the one I implemented for the Karate A.I. game. The [...]
If you’re interested in learning more about scientific programming in Python, and want to compete in a Pacman capture-the-flag tournament, join us for the next Advanced Scientific Programming in Python summer school in St. Andrew, UK! The faculty line-up includes developers of well-known scientific libraries for Python (e.g., Francesc Alted of PyTables fame). The program [...]
I never got the chance to show a working agent based on the Bayesian estimator for the enemy position in the PacMan capture-the-flag game. In the previous PacMan post, I wrote about merging a model of agent movements with the noisy measurements returned by the game to track the enemy agents across the maze. Clearly, [...]
The Computer Science of the University of Waterloo is organizing its second Google AI Challenge. The challenge is a competition between computer programs that control the artificial intelligence of the players in a video game. This time, the game is set in space, and features a symmetric configuration of planets, each containing a fleet of [...]
I set up a github repository for the source code and other material published here. It’s a much more convenient way to share source code than uploading archive files. You can find it at http://github.com/pberkes/masterbaboon . Enjoy!
In the previous two posts I showed how to make use of decision theory to write a game AI that forms a model of its opponent and adapts its strategy accordingly. The AI could be improved in several ways: The most obvious improvement would be to build a better model of the opponent. In the [...]
Did you ever need to sample from a Dirichlet distribution in Actionscript 3.0? What about computing a value of the Gamma function? Probably not In case you did, I wrote a class with a few math methods: a function to sample from multinomial distributions; this is useful if you need to choose randomly from a [...]