XPost: comp.ai.genetic, comp.ai.neural-nets
From: sacrificialaccount@yahoo.co.uk
Hi,
OK, so I contrived the acronym to spell REACTS. The "A" could be
"Automatic" instead of "Agent."
But it's a need which has come up several times, and does not quite
seem to be filled by any existing protocol/system.
This is to cover cases where programs are to be entered into a
competition, which then proceeds through some number of "rounds",
"games" or "tournaments". E.g. I've seen a few open-source projects
that want to proceed like this and also there's often similar
competitions proposed to go with AI conferences. For example there's
two proposed for IEEE CIGames 2005: one for Go and one for soccer...
And although I'm interested in "evolving" players, the system is just
as suitable for "learning" or even hand-coded entries.
--
Why are such competitions to be encouraged:
1 - they are hugely motivating for all involved
2 - they can proceed, largely without human intervention, and test
your systems far more thoroughly than you can on your own
3 - although I call these "games" and "competitions", they're actually
just a take on grid-computing
4 - they're good PR
--
What I'm proposing is a system in two parts:
1) a ready-built server (admin-Server) which can sit on a central
machine and automatically administer a competition
2) a small library (comms-library), available for all popular
languages, to enable client programs to contact the competition server
The admin-server will not be a server to run the simulations involved
in the competition (e.g. it doesn't simulate football or Go) but it
administers the connection of the players to a central machine,
activates other programs to handle the simulation (game-servers),
hands the players over to the game-servers, and gathers the results
back.
More-importantly for the hard-worked academic, by providing
communications libraries in popular languages, it removes the need to
hand-code
communications-protocols in the client or game-servers.
This is a tool-kit, and will not enforce any hard-wired approach to
the
competition, e.g.:
- competition format (league, championship, match-play, ladder, arena,
...) would be configured by adding some custom rules to the
admin-server (probably by recompiling one function, but in time there
would no-doubt be half a dozen built in "standard" options).
- nature of the "players" is open, as they can either _be_ the remote
client, or more-abstract entities being run _in_ the remote client, or
data transmitted _from_ the remote client and run on the game-server.
- nature of game simulation is open (as REACTS doesn't run it :) --
sport, physics, economics, ecology, problem-solving ... (you just need
to include the comms-library in the simulation software so that it can
send results back to the admin-server)
- network usage is open, the admin server can launch game-servers on
its own machine, or it can call up a remote copy of itself and tell it
to host this game, or it can tell one of the player-machines to host
the game (which will involve telling the human competitors to install
the simulation-software).
--
So, to summarize:
* a ready-made admin-server for competitions with evolving players
* few constraints on how you set it up
* ready-made libraries for popular languages: C, C++, Java, Lisp (can
use C or Java can't it), python
* open-source
* should be almost ready to go "out of the box"
* basic security (e.g. a password for each client and no messages sent
"in the clear")
--
What do I want?
First, any basic comments (on the group).
Second, any expressions of interest in planning or using this system
(you need to decode my email from below, not use the address on this
posting which got full-o-spam months ago).
If not too many of the comments say "we already have this" or "nobody
wants that" then I'll get together the people who expressed an
interest and thrash out the details.
I'm not offering to write this, but I know several places where I can
go to look for code-monkeys. I will volunteer to coordinate the
design and standards, however.
If it does take off, I will ask people to test it, write it up and
generally spread the word. And we could probably do with somebody to
maintain a pro-temp web-site (on sourceforge would be handy).
Any interest?
Ian Badcoe (triangleigbgeneralaccount@yahoo.square.co.uk)
(remove two shapes from the address to contact me)
--
Living@Home - Open Source Evolving Organisms -
http://livingathome.sourceforge.net/
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