Title
Evolving the strategies of agents for the ANTS game
Abstract
This work studies the performance and the results of the application of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for evolving the decision engine of a program, called in this context agent, which controls the player's behaviour in an real-time strategy game (RTS). This game was chosen for the Google Artificial Intelligence Challenge in 2011, and simulates battles between teams of ants in different types of maps or mazes. According to the championship rules the agents cannot save information from one game to the next, which makes impossible to implement an EA 'inside' the agent, i.e. on game time (or on-line), that is why in this paper we have evolved this engine off-line by means of an EA, used for tuning a set of constants, weights and probabilities which direct the rules. This evolved agent has fought against other successful bots which finished in higher positions in the competition final rank. The results show that, although the best agents are difficult to beat, our simple agent tuned with an EA can outperform agents which have finished 1000 positions above the untrained version.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-642-38682-4_35
IWANN (2)
Keywords
Field
DocType
simple agent,game time,decision engine,context agent,championship rule,google artificial intelligence challenge,best agent,real-time strategy game,competition final rank,evolutionary algorithms,ants game
Evolutionary algorithm,Championship,Computer science,Decision support system,Artificial intelligence,Non-cooperative game,Genetic algorithm,Machine learning
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7903
0302-9743
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
12
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
José Carpio1214.43
Pablo García-sánchez218232.32
Antonio M. Mora3295.81
Juan Julián Merelo4526.23
Jesús Caraballo500.34
Fermín Vaz600.34
Carlos Cotta744136.10