Optimising Humanness: Designing the best human-like Bot for Unreal Tournament 2004

This paper presents multiple hybridizations of the two best bots on the BotPrize 2014 competition, which sought for the best humanlike bot playing the First Person Shooter game Unreal Tournament 2004. To this aim the participants were evaluated using a Turing test in the game. The work considers MirrorBot (the winner) and NizorBot (the second) codes and combines them in two different approaches, aiming to obtain a bot able to show the best behaviour overall. There is also an evolutionary version on MirrorBot, which has been optimized by means of a Genetic Algorithm. The new and the original bots have been tested in a new, open, and public Turing test whose results show that the evolutionary version of MirrorBot apparently improves the original bot, and also that one of the novel approaches gets a good humanness level.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Coordinación global basada en controladores locales reactivos en la RoboCup

Actas del Primer Workshop Hispano-Luso en Agentes Físicos, Tarragona, 12/13-X-2000El principal problema a que nos enfrentamos al diseñar sistemas multi-agente es cómo coordinar los agentes que pertenecen a este sistema para obtener un comportamiento global eficiente. En algunos trabajos, el comportamiento coordinado de los agentes se obtiene gracias a un conocimiento total del dominio en el que se pueden aplicar planificadores tradicionales. Sin embargo, en muchos dominios esta aproximación no es posible por tratarse de dominios demasiado grandes y la comunicación y capacidad de memoria de los agentes muy limitada. En este trabajo se presenta un diseño multi-agente que permite obtener un comportamiento global coordinado basado en los comportamientos reactivos de los agentes que son controlados o dirigidos por la información local que poseen. En el diseño se ha minimizado la comunicación entre los agentes, ya que el proceso de coordinación se basa en reglas locales reactivas. Esta propuesta tiene una primera aplicación en el dominio de la RoboCup (Robot World Cup Iniciative), proyecto ampliamente utilizado por la comunidad investigadora. Palabras Clave: Inteligencia artificial distribuida, sistemas multi-agente, comportamientos cooperativos, comportamientos reactivos, RoboCupComisión Interministerial de Ciencia y TecnologíaRed Temática EUROBOT-IBEscola Técnica Superior d'Enginyeria (ETSE)Grup de Robótica i Visió Intel•ligents (RIVI)Departament d'Enginyeria Electrónica, Eléctrica i Automática (DEEEA)Departament d'Enginyeria Informática i Matemática (DEIM)Publicad

Cooperación en sistemas distribuidos de robots reactivos minimizando la cantidad de información comunicada

Actas de: Simposio Español de Infomática Distribuida (SEID 2000), Ourense, 25-27 de septiembre de 2000La coordinación emergente pretende obtener comportamientos colaborativos entre diversos agentes sin que eso implique que cada individuo deba tener un conocimiento global del dominio, y sin que ese conocimiento deba estar centralizado. Al no requerir conocimiento global, se minimiza la comunicación entre los agentes de forma que cada uno de ellos puede comportarse de forma reactiva y totalmente autónoma. En este trabajo se presenta una primera aproximación a este modelo de coordinación aplicado al dominio de la RoboCup.Publicad

Blockade of the Interaction of Calcineurin with FOXO in Astrocytes Protects Against Amyloid-βInduced Neuronal Death

Astrocytes actively participate in neuro-inflammatory processes associated to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and other brain pathologies. We recently showed that an astrocyte-specific intracellular signaling pathway involving an interaction of the phosphatase calcineurin with the transcription factor FOXO3 is a major driver in AD associated pathological inflammation, suggesting a potential new druggable target for this devastating disease. We have now developed decoy molecules to interfere with calcineurin/FOXO3 interactions, and tested them in astrocytes and neuronal co-cultures exposed to amyloid-β (Aβ) toxicity. We observed that interference of calcineurin/FOXO3 interactions exerts a protective action against A-induced neuronal death and favors the production of a set of growth factors that we hypothesize form part of a cytoprotective pathway to resolve inflammation. Furthermore, interference of the A-induced interaction of calcineurin with FOXO3 by decoy compounds significantly decreased amyloid-β protein precursor (AβPP) synthesis, reduced the AβPP amyloidogenic pathway, resulting in lower Alevels, and blocked the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines TNFα and IL-6 in astrocytes. Collectively, these data indicate that interrupting pro-inflammatory calcineurin/FOXO3 interactions in astrocytes triggered by Aβ accumulation in brain may constitute an effective new therapeutic approach in AD. Future studies with intranasal delivery, or brain barrier permeable decoy compounds, are warranted

How well do CMIP5 Earth System Models simulate present climate conditions in Europe and Africa?

This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of seven Earth System Models (ESMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 in present climate conditions from a downscaling perspective, taking into account the requirements of both statistical and dynamical approaches. ECMWF's ERA-Interim reanalysis is used as reference for an evaluation of circulation, temperature and humidity variables on daily timescale, which is based on distributional similarity scores. To additionally obtain an estimate of reanalysis uncertainty, ERA-Interim's deviation from the Japanese Meteorological Agency JRA-25 reanalysis is calculated. Areas with considerable differences between both reanalyses do not allow for a proper assessment, since ESM performance is sensitive to the choice of reanalysis. For use in statistical downscaling studies, ESM performance is computed on the grid-box scale and mapped over a large spatial domain covering Europe and Africa, additionally highlighting those regions where significant distributional differences remain even for the centered/zero-mean time series. For use in dynamical downscaling studies, performance is specifically assessed along the lateral boundaries of the three CORDEX domains defined for Europe, the Mediterranean Basin and Africa.S.B. would like to thank the CSIC JAE-PREDOC programme for financial support. J.F. and J.M.G. acknowledge financial support from the Spanish R&D&I programme through grants CGL2010-22158-C02 (CORWES project) and CGL2010-21869 (EXTREMBLES project) and from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 243888 (FUME Project).Peer Reviewe

Solving Sudoku with Membrane Computing

Sudoku is a very popular puzzle which consists on placing several numbers in a squared grid according to some simple rules. In this paper we present an efficient family of P systems which solve sudokus of any order verifying a specific property. The solution is searched by using a simple human-style method. If the sudoku cannot be solved by using this strategy, the P system detects this drawback and then the computations stops and returns No. Otherwise, the P system encodes the solution and returns Yes in the last computation step.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008-04487-EMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009–13192Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-0420