An announcement of the course can also be found in the course information system CAMPUS.

Contents

The Knowledge-based Systems Group is, amongst other things, doing research in agent controllers for interactive computer games (for a not so recent example have a look at the ReadyBot website).

Developing agents for interactive computer games poses several problems to solve: acting rationally under hard real-time constraints, agent-to-agent communication, planning under uncertainty, distributed decision-making, team-coordination, etc.

The goal of this lab course is to develop and test (an) agent(s) for one or more interactive computer games and integrate those into our existing software framework. The development may include establishing the integration with a game API, implementing basic behaviors (skills) of an agent as well as designing and implementing the high-level decision making.

In this lab course you have the chance to

• take part in a distributed software development process
• develop and compete with intelligent autonomous agents
• apply methods of AI to interactive computer games

Requirements

• basic study period completed (Vordiplom)
• lecture "Artificial Intelligence" from our department (or objective evidence of equivalent knowledge)
• profound programming skills (at least C++ and preferably also Lua)
• high motivation (at least 5 hours per week)
• Linux skills
• successfully solve the Qualifying Test

Qualifying Test

In order to make sure the applicant fulfills the requirements needed, we require that every applicant hands in a solution to a qualifying test as described below:

The task is to implement an agent program for the game of Tic-Tac-Toe. For your implementation make use of a small framework that provides the basic game logic. You can download the code from here. Send your implementation to Daniel Beck by June 28th.
Comments and patches for the provided code are welcome. Please send them to Daniel Beck.
Note: successfully solving this task is a necessary requirement in order to get a place in this course.

Registration

Slots are being centrally assigned. Registration is open from June 15th to June 28th through the Central Seminar and Practical Project Seminar (Praktikum) Registration System

Material

Please have a look at the L²P learning room (once it's open) for this course.

Dates + Schedule

The first meeting will be on July XX (tentative) and the lab will start directly thereafter with the familiarization with our software framework.

• short talks on agent architectures and agents for computer games
• getting to know our software framework (Fawkes)
• choice of game(s) and agent-architecture(s) to use
• work in groups (max. 3 students each)
• integration with Fawkes
• implementation of agents
• final competition