2018 Submission Instructions

Our competition deadline is: July 20th 2018 23:59 UTC-12.

For the submission of agents, please email:

  • all files necessary to run your agent;
  • instructions for executing your agent;
  • a brief (1 page max) document explaining the method you have used.

To: TextAdventureAIComp@gmail.com

The absolute final deadline for the submission of agents is July20th 2018 23:59 UTC-12. After this date no revisions of agents will be accepted. So it is worthwhile sending us your code earlier, and talking with the team, to ensure that we can run your code as you intend to provide it.

We’re excited to see what you have all been working on!

2018 Competition - Update

Firstly, the competition may disappear from the CIG 2018 website in the coming days. This is because the CIG organisers expect a short video to be produced for each competition by April 15th, but due to our own organisers travelling and intending to make some modifications to the code base, this may not happen for another week or two. We have been informed by CIG that upon producing a video, the competition will be listed again - so this does not mean the competition is cancelled.

We are also planning to add some new features to the code base to help both the development of entrants and the running of the competition:

  • The ability to run a given agent on a specified folder of games for a given number of steps.
  • In built detection and reporting of an agent’s score on a given game. We’ll let you know when these new features are available. They shouldn’t cause any issues with your existing agents.

If you have any questions, please get in touch at textadventureraicomp@gmail.com

2018 Competition

We intend to run the 3rd Text-Based Adventure AI Competition at the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games at Maastricht University, Netherlands.

More information to follow…

2017 Competition Results

Last week, the 2017 Text-Based Adventure AI Competition results were announced at the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Conference in New York. The results were:

1st. BYU 2016 Agent - Nancy Fulda, Daniel Ricks, Ben Murdoch, David Wingate. Brigham Young University, USA

2nd. CARL – Nancy Fulda, Daniel Ricks, Ben Murdoch, David Wingate. Brigham Young University, USA

3rd. The Golovin Agent – Bartosz Kostka, Jarosław Kwiecień, Jakub Kowalski and Pawel Rychlikowski. University of Wrocław, Poland

Our winners again this year, was last year’s winning agent that the team from BYU have made available as open source and published at IJCAI.

2nd and 3rd place was a close decision as both agents achieved the same score on our test game. Therefore, we went to our second scoring criteria (a subjective decision by the competition judges on the agent’s freedom from a priori bias) and awarded 2nd place to BYU’s new agent CARL.

Our 3rd place competitor, The Golovin Agent, is also available as open source and was both published and nominated for the best paper award at CIG.

We would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank all competitors for the world-class research they have produced in participating in this competition. In particular we are taking inspiration from the evaluation methods they have used and considering options to adopt similar approaches in future iterations of the competition.

Finally, as shown by the evaluation in both papers and the competition results, there is still significant room for improvement in general text-based adventure AI performance. We hope this competition, the codebases available and the papers published all help to engage more of the game AI community in pursuing this challenging open problem!

2017 Submission Instructions

We’re in to the final two weeks until the competition deadline: August 1st 2017 23:59 UTC-12.

For the submission of agents, please email:

  • all files necessary to run your agent;
  • instructions for executing your agent;
  • a brief (1 page max) document explaining the method you have used.

To: TextAdventureAIComp@gmail.com

The absolute final deadline for the submission of agents is August 1st 2017 23:59 UTC-12. After this date no revisions of agents will be accepted. So it is worthwhile sending us your code earlier, and talking with the team, to ensure that we can run your code as you intend to provide it.

We’re excited to see what you have all been working on!