Virtual Witches and Warlocks:
Computational Evolution of Teamwork and Strategy in a Dynamic, Heterogeneous and Noisy 3D Environment
Abstract. Games make excellent challenge problems for Artificial Intelligence. Two-player turn-based games (Backgammon, Checkers, Chess) are easy to program, and AI players can be benchmarked against humans of varying skill levels. Recently, more complicated real-time team games have received attention from researchers in the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) fields because of the dynamic environments and necessity for coordination. The RoboCup Soccer Simulator is the most popular and well-known of these environments. However, the soccer simulator is restricted to only two dimensions, and does not realistically model physics. This Division III thesis describes a simulator of the imaginary game Quidditch, and the automatic programming of quidditch-playing teams by Genetic Programming. These evolved teams of heterogeneous agents have offensive and defensive behaviors, and show the beginnings of real teamwork.
Downloads:
- First Screenshots (03/2004)
- Source code used to generate results reported in my Division III thesis
- Source code for a standalone Quidditch Simulator. Unzip and run QSEE.tz in breve. Feel free to use this for your own AI experiments. Please email me any improvements/cool results! (last update: 12/12/2005)
Documentation/Publications:
- Original proposal by Spector et al.:
Spector, L., R. Moore, and A. Robinson. 2001. Virtual Quidditch: A Challenge Problem
for Automatically Programmed Software Agents. In E.D. Goodman, editor, Late-Breaking
Papers of GECCO-2001, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Published
by the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. (pdf
244KB).
- Crawford-Marks, Raphael. 2004. Virtual Witches and Warlocks: Computational Evolution of Teamwork and Strategy in a Dynamic, Heterogeneous and Noisy 3D Environment. Division III (senior) Thesis, Hampshire College. (pdf 460KB)
- Crawford-Marks, R., L. Spector, and J. Klein. 2004. Virtual Witches and Warlocks: A Quidditch Simulator and Quidditch-Playing Teams Coevolved via Genetic Programming. In Late-Breaking Papers of GECCO-2004, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Published by the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. (pdf 308KB, additional movies).
Related Work: