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New Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars
- pohl 16y agoIs the structure of this game isomorphic to some other real-world problem they're interested in?
- phreeza 16y agoI like the "Advanced Strategy Guide". As of 16:22 UTC all it says is "I got nothin" http://ai-contest.com/advanced_strategy_guide.php http://ai-contest.com/advanced_strategy_guide.php
- Cyndre 16y agoYet another fun challenge in the form of an AI challenge. I really enjoyed the tron ai contest and I am looking forward to this one. Good luck Colonizing and coding.
- petercooper 16y agoTo skip the 3 line interstital blog post: http://ai-contest.com/ http://ai-contest.com/
- aerique 16y agoYeah, I don't understand why that link wasn't posted. My blog post was just meant to get it on Planet Lisp and make the Lispers aware.
- petercooper 16y agoAs someone who writes similar types of post (though usually a bit longer ;-)) I share your pain.
- aerique 16y agoThis one was indeed exceptionally short. My excuse: I was at work :-)
- mnemonik 16y agoHeh, my bad everyone :) This blog came in my Google Reader feed from Planet Lisp and I was mostly excited about the possibility of a CL package. I just submitted with my Reader + HN greasemonkey script (http://github.com/fitzgen/reader-submit-to-hn http://github.com/fitzgen/reader-submit-to-hn) without a second thought...
- zeteo 16y agoIs there any place where the game's rules are exactly given? I'm particularly interested in how the growth rate and battles work. The Python package that I've downloaded contains no such info.
- what 16y agohttp://ai-contest.com/problem_description.php http://ai-contest.com/problem_description.php
- zeteo 16y agoThat's the first place I've looked and it contains no clear information about the questions I'm asking. A. "the number of ships on non-neutral planets increases according to the growth rate for that planet." What does "according" mean - simple addition? And what happens to the neutral planets - no growth? In which case, how many fleets do the neutral planets start with? b. "If the result is less than zero, then your bot gains control of the planet." And how many losses have you incurred - exactly the number of defenders? If the defenders win, do they suffer losses equal to the number of attackers? The reason I'm asking is that, if all the game does is simple addition and subtraction (no defense advantage, no Lanchester-type law for combat), then there probably exists a very simple optimal strategy, and it's more a problem of mathematics than AI.
- what 16y agoI'm pretty sure everything is just simple addition/subtraction. Watching the video, neutral planets don't have any growth. When you get a planet to -1 you take control and are left with 0 ships there. (In the video green sent a fleet of 50 to a planet with 4, green took control of the planet and had 45 ships there)
- aerique 16y agoI haven't seen specific info yet. Your best bet is to download a starter package and run the game locally. I've only played with it a little and my impression is that growth rate is an integer that's added to the planet's population every turn, but only occupied planets not neutral ones. (So a planet of yours with a population of 138 and a growth rate of 5 will have a population of 143 next turn (assuming no increase or decrease from friendly or enemy ships).)
- troutwine 16y agoI rather wish their forum was open. I'm only receiving a blank grey window when I run ShowGame over a game's text. Alas. Edit: I suppose the outage was momentary; the forum is rather hopping.
- Estragon 16y agoI downloaded the source from Google Code, and found the invocation in a .php file there. (Grep for "ShowGame"). After adjusting for the fact that I had the python starter kit, the invocation worked without problems.
- troutwine 16y agoI'm not familiar with the Google Code site. Could your provide a link? I've downloaded my kit from: http://ai-contest.com/starter_packages.php http://ai-contest.com/starter_packages.php Also, for what it's worth: http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=405&sid=c80b58cba82edd661ebfea3b8238c1cc http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=405&... I suspect I'm having a goofy Java issue, but that's likely a personal bias.
- Estragon 16y agoCheck the source out from subversion, as described here: http://code.google.com/p/ai-contest/source/checkout http://code.google.com/p/ai-contest/source/checkout
- NationalHQ 16y agoWhere's the html5/javascript package? :\
- _delirium 16y agoIt's probably still too early on in these non-board-game-like game-AI competitions to do serious comparisons, but one thing that'd be cool to figure out in the future is how many components are resuable between these kinds of problems, versus requiring different strategy or hand tuning / hand feature extraction. For example, could similar bots do well at both Planet Wars and Starcraft (http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition)? If not, are there parts that can be shared (e.g. factor out high-level strategy versus low-level unit control)? Etc.
- endtime 16y agoRelevant: http://cs227b.stanford.edu http://cs227b.stanford.edu (General Game Playing) GGPs can pretty much play any game with no continuous or unbounded variables, i.e. any game with a finite number of states. Popular examples include tic-tac-toe, checkers, and Connect 4; here's a larger list: http://code.google.com/p/ggp-base/source/browse/trunk/ggp-base/games/rulesheets http://code.google.com/p/ggp-base/source/browse/trunk/ggp-ba... Planet Wars could be played by a GGP, assuming some bound on the number of ships that could be created, but standard approaches like UCT, which don't take into consideration similarity between states [1], would fail hard against a specialized player. [1] For example, if UCT saw a good move in a given state, it wouldn't apply that knowledge to the adjacent state in which only one ship is in a different location.
- _delirium 16y agoAh yeah, I'm quite familiar with GGP. I'm very skeptical of its "generality", though, once you get away from anything that's vaguely similar to chess. For example, try writing Starcraft in GDL (even a discretized version); it's not impossible, but I sure wouldn't want to do it, and the result wouldn't be tractably usable by any GGP engines either. I'm working on a project currently that needs a logical representation of videogames, but I'm not using GDL, because it's just a pain in the ass for videogames (and I want an internal time axis also, not a state-transition system). But mostly I was thinking on the playing side: I don't think any of the current GGP approaches can even come close to playing strategy-type video games, because they don't typically have any real notion of, as you mention, similarity between situations, or a decomposition into hierarchical or interrelated concerns. A Starcraft bot that treated Dragoon microcontrol as an equivalent-level problem to build order probably isn't going to do well. I think the robotics community might actually have a better starting point: architectures with interrelated components like SLAM, planning, motor control, etc., as opposed to trying to turn the "robotics problem" into one giant state space to be navigated by one giant algorithm. Trying to build an agent that plays two quite different strategy games well (Starcraft and Planet Wars) might be one way of driving the development of those kinds of decompositions.
- NationalHQ 16y agoDoes this teach me how to think with artificial intelligence?
- Tichy 16y agoIf you choose to solve it with artificial intelligence, then yes.
- javert 16y agoIs it just me or is having the navigation on the right hand side of the page really unusual?
- petercooper 16y agoIt's not the "standard" but sidebars are common enough for it to work. Back in the 1998-2002 area, right hand navigation bars had a spurt of popularity because of usability findings in relation to the ease of moving between the scrollbar and the items. With the advent of scroll wheels, though, this hack became less significant and left handed navigation began to rule once again.
- icegreentea 16y agoSeems like the standard 'blog' (or at least blogspot) format.
- Groxx 16y ago>Use of multiple processes or threads is prohibited. How about mimicking them? Can one perform in-process "context switches" to do the same thing? If no: where do you draw the line? Must each second's decisions be deterministic from the board state? If yes: what's the difference? Ease of programming seems a poor metric, and you could just nab something that's already written that does this for you, resulting in nothing but increased compilation times.
- a1k0n 16y agoThe reason for this restriction is because your process and your opponent's run simultaneously on the same machine, so you only get one CPU. Doing your own userspace threading or whatever is fine.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- aharrison 16y agoIs anyone aware of an AI game that has a homeostatic goal? I am thinking along the lines of a SimCity style game where random negative events happen and our AI would have to account and route around these types of issues. It would be interesting to see a simulation of that nature as compared to the normal competitive game (e.g. chess, go, reversi.)
- bluesnowmonkey 16y agoGalcon itself used to be mod-able, with several people creating bots for it. Someone rolled them all together in a single mod allowing you to pit different AIs against each other, tournament style. The whole package was an excellent sandbox for teaching AI to budding programmers. Sadly, that's all gone. Mods are gone, the modding forum is gone. Rather than an engrossing programming game, Galcon is now a mind-numbing clickfest. I am delighted to see Google picking up the concept.
- andreyf 16y agoDo you know who worked on it, and why it's gone? I might be interested in making a extensible HTML5 version of it...