Ms Pac-Man versus Ghost Team CEC 2011 competition

Games provide an ideal test bed for computational intelligence and significant progress has been made in recent years, most notably in games such as Go, where the level of play is now competitive with expert human play on smaller boards. Recently, a significantly more complex class of games has received increasing attention: real-time video games. These games pose many new challenges, including strict time constraints, simultaneous moves and open-endedness. Unlike in traditional board games, computational play is generally unable to compete with human players. One driving force in improving the overall performance of artificial intelligence players are game competitions where practitioners may evaluate and compare their methods against those submitted by others and possibly human players as well. In this paper we introduce a new competition based on the popular arcade video game Ms Pac-Man: Ms Pac-Man versus Ghost Team. The competition, to be held at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2011 for the first time, allows participants to develop controllers for either the Ms Pac-Man agent or for the Ghost Team and unlike previous Ms Pac-Man competitions that relied on screen capture, the players now interface directly with the game engine. In this paper we introduce the competition, including a review of previous work as well as a discussion of several aspects regarding the setting up of the game competition itself. © 2011 IEEE

The implications of embodiment for behavior and cognition: animal and robotic case studies

In this paper, we will argue that if we want to understand the function of the brain (or the control in the case of robots), we must understand how the brain is embedded into the physical system, and how the organism interacts with the real world. While embodiment has often been used in its trivial meaning, i.e. 'intelligence requires a body', the concept has deeper and more important implications, concerned with the relation between physical and information (neural, control) processes. A number of case studies are presented to illustrate the concept. These involve animals and robots and are concentrated around locomotion, grasping, and visual perception. A theoretical scheme that can be used to embed the diverse case studies will be presented. Finally, we will establish a link between the low-level sensory-motor processes and cognition. We will present an embodied view on categorization, and propose the concepts of 'body schema' and 'forward models' as a natural extension of the embodied approach toward first representations.Comment: Book chapter in W. Tschacher & C. Bergomi, ed., 'The Implications of Embodiment: Cognition and Communication', Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 31-5

Humanoid Robot Kick in Motion Ability for Playing Robotic Soccer

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence are two deeply intertwined fields of study, currently experiencing formidable growth. To foster these developments, the RoboCup initiative is a fantastic test bed to experiment new approaches. This dissertation seeks to gather these possibilities to design and implement a humanoid robotic kick system employing deep neural networks, capable of fluidly kicking a ball while walking. This dissertation's work is rooted in the groundwork laid by previous FCPortugal3D teams so as to take the existing algorithms and skills into its consideration. In this way, a transition between a dynamic movement situation and one where the agent is kicking is achieved. Furthermore, it uses the new agent framework developed by the FCPortugal3D team so as to allow these tests to be built upon for future situations with ease

Prediction of the Ball Location on the 2D Plane in Football Using Optical Tracking Data

Tracking the ball location is essential for automated game analysis in complex ball-centered team sports such as football. However, it has always been a challenge for image processing-based techniques because the players and other factors often occlude the view of the ball. This study proposes an automated machine learning-based method for predicting the ball location from players' behavior on the pitch. The model has been built by processing spatial information of players acquired from optical tracking data. Optical tracking data include samples from 300 matches of the 2017-2018 season of the Turkish Football Federation's Super League. We use neural networks to predict the ball location in 2D axes. The average coefficient of determination of the ball tracking model on the test set both for the x-axis and the y-axis is accordingly 79% and 92%, where the mean absolute error is 7.56 meters for the x-axis and 5.01 meters for the y-axi