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Email the DepartmentGame Playing Interface for Teaching AI
Description:
Every year, the CS Dept. and SIUE offers and intro to Artificial Intelligence Course to its students. One of the topics covered in this course is Heuristic Search techniques. To give student experience writing a heuristics, they are assigned to write a game playing agent that competes in a competition. The most recent incarnation of this competition is called Link4, a Connect Four like game supporting an increased number of rows and columns. This website contains the software that is used by students to test and compete against their own programs.
References:
Lamonica, A., Yu. X., and Weinberg, J.B., (2004) "Keeping the Focus on Heuristics: Network Game Agent for Teaching AI",
Accessible Hands on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Education: Working Papers of the 2004 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, pp. 170-174.
- Paper: Network Game Playing Agent for Teaching AI (PDF)
- Poster: Presented at the AAAI Spring Symposium
Software:
The software is comprised of three packages an interface that allows students to visualize their programs' game playing ability, a name server that allows students to find each others' agents on the network, and a Student Agent program that students program to play Link4.
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Link4 Interface:
The interface connects to one or two Student Agents and shows a game being played between them. The Interface is configurable via an XML ".config" file located in the same directory as the executable and sharing the same file name. The Interface was written in C# using Visual Studio.NET 2003 but uses clear text TCP sockets to communicate to the Name Server and Student Agents. The source conforms to the GPL and is available.
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Name Server:
Although not strictly necessary, the name server allows the users of the Link4 Interface to quickly select Student Agents to participate in a game. The Name Server accomplishes this by keeping a record for each currently running Student Agent's Name, IP address, and Listening Port Number. These records are sorted by workstation IP address and expire if the agent crashes. The software was written in Java.
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Student Agent Template:
To reduce the time students need to spend writing their Student Agents a template has been provided that students can use as a starting point for their implementations. When this program was first used we were still using Visual Studio 6. We are now using Visual Studio 2005 so both project types are available. If you use g++ I suggest that you download the VS 2005 version. It does not use a pre-compiled library and will be easier to port.
