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

A Bayesian model for longitudinal circular data

The analysis of short longitudinal series of circular data may be problematic and to some extent has not been completely developed. In this paper we present a Bayesian analysis of a model for such data. The model is based on a radial projection onto the circle of a particular bivariate normal distribution. Inferences about the parameters of the model are based on samples from the corresponding joint posterior density which are obtained using a Metropolis-within-Gibbs scheme after the introduction of suitable latent variables. The procedure is illustrated both using a simulated data set and a realdata set previously analyzed in the literature.Circular data, Longitudinal data, Gibbs sampler, Latent variables, Mixed-effects linear models, Projected normal distribution

Private benefits extraction in closely-held corporations: the case for multiple large shareholders

This paper investigates how multiple large shareholders share control and extract private benefits in closely-held corporations. We find that ownership structures with multiple large shareholders are common and very stable. Moreover, they seem to be, to a large extent, exogenously given. The structure of the controlling group of shareholders has a very significant impact on performance. Performance improves as the control group's ownership stake increases and, for a given ownership stake, as the number of members increases. The economic significance of the effects indicates that minority expropriation is a very important problem in closely-held firms