ANGRY BIRDS - Human vs Machine!
You might have heard about it in the news, on twitter or facebook, or from one of the organisers Jochen Renz, Stephen Gould, Charles Gretton and Patrik Haslum. It’s Human vs Machine!
The first Angry Birds AI challenge was held as part of the Australasian joint conference on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney, 4-7 December 2012.
Participants from around the world competed to be the first Angry Birds AI champion, a competition in which they had to create a program, known as an agent, to play the popular game Angry Birds. What made it particularly challenging was that participants only had five weeks to develop their agents.
In the second part of the competition, people competed against the best AI agents to see who was better at playing the game: humans or machines.
Despite very short notice, the competition generated a lot of media interest and reports appeared in newspapers, online, radio and TV. Journalists saw this as the new man vs machine duel and compared it to the legendary Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov chess competition.
For more details of the challenge and to hear about some of the problems competitors had to overcome in creating their agents, have a look at this interview with Jochen Renz.
