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 [...]

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 [...]

As another scientific Python course is approaching, I’ve been brushing up my PacMan skills. I decided to give a try to a strategy I had been thinking on, which relies upon having a good estimate of the enemy’s position. I should remind the reader that in the PacMan capture-the-flag game, one team does not know [...]

At the beginning of September I’ve been invited to teach at a summer school about scientific programming. The whole experience has been really rewarding, but it was the student’s project that got me going: we had the students write artificial intelligence algorithms for the agents of a PacMan-like game, and organized a tournament for them [...]

In the last post I discussed how it is possible to program a game Artificial Intelligence to exploit a player’s unconscious biases using a simple mathematical model. In the karate game above, the AI uses that model in order to do the largest amount of damage. Give [...]