Before the widespread availability of graphics displays, text-based games such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork were popular in the adventure and role-playing gaming community. Due to the richness of natural language text, such games with text-only interfaces offer a useful testbed for AI research. Building a fully autonomous agent for an arbitrary text adventure game is AI complete. However, we test on a variety of different games with graded numerical scores, allowing competitors to gradually increase the sophistication of their approach to handle increasingly complex challenges. We believe that our competition can foster research into fields such as natural language processing and automatic model acquisition, as well as shed light on the relative merits of model-based and model-free approaches.
Entrants will submit agents to play games for the classic text adventuring engine, the Z-Machine. The competition will be scored according to two independent criteria:
C1 is the dominant criterion, with C2 deciding in the event of a tie. C2 is intended to favour agents that have no (or less) knowledge of the problem domain built in.
Competition Entry Deadline: TBA
The Text-Based Adventure AI Competition is being organised by:
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