Building a better bot

Other than the winners of the Nullarbor contest the other big announcement from the Perth IGDA meeting was that of the The 2K Bot Prize.

ECU’s Philip Hingston took the stage to tell us about the comp to build a better bot. 2K Australia (previously known as Irrational Games) is offering a $10,000 prize to the programmer who can make a bot that tricks the panel of judges into thinking it’s a human; kinda like a Turing Test for bots. There will be two groups of human players, the judges, a control group of sample players (who are not novices, but who aren’t crack-shot professionals either) and mixed in with them there will be the AI bots created by entrants.

If the judges can’t distinguish between the play of your bot and the humans, then you win $7000 plus a trip to the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (and the 2K Australia Studios) valued at $3000. If no bots pass the test, the best effort will take home $2000 cash and still grab the trip.

This is a great competition from my point of view. Creating a bot that can headshot anything that moves is simple, but it’s not a great idea. On the fun side, it’s like trying to play tennis against a cannon.

Creating a bot that feels like it has a personality, a play style and emotional motivations is something completely different. It not only offers players a challenge, but gives them a real sense of competition, as they square off against a foe that feels like it has skills that are worth competing against, not just a lucky dip bag of queued cheats and cheap tricks.  A lot of AI research and competitions are serious navel-gazing but this has an immediate commercial outcome which is fantastic.  2K is obviously wanting to interview whomever wins but since their studio is in Canberra and there are now some great options (IZ, BC, SF) for working in sunny Perth, I’ll certainly be in there talking to the winners too.

Incidentally, Perth’s own Jason Hutchens won a similar but more complex competition (the Loebner Prize) while a student at UWA and it certainly helped launch his career in the games industry.  He’s back in Perth at Interzone now and apparently won’t be entering this competition, so it’s an ideal chance for aspiring AI programmers.

The platform for this competition is the modding classic Unreal 2004, and a plug-in is available to simplify the interface and present the game as a TCP socket for your application to interrogate and command. You can check the details at www.botprize.org, but if you want to participate you’ll have to move quickly as the competition closes in November.