The 15th edition of the Multi-Agent Programming Contest

The Scenario: Agents Assemble II

Agents with limited local vision have to organize to assemble and deliver complex structures made of blocks, in a grid world.

The scenario is a revision of the previous edition.

Also see the official Call for Participation.

Contest

Results

Replays

Monday

Tuesday

Free for all

After the contest, we invited everyone to stress test our system (and their implementations) by playing all at the same time in unofficial free for all simulations. Replays:

• 15 agents each
• 30 agents each

Schedule

Monday (15th March 2021)

Tuesday (16th March 2021)

Wednesday (17th March 2021)

15:00 GMT+1/CET: Watch party. Grab some snacks, join us in the chat and we’ll watch the match replays together.

Participants

In order of registration:

Timeline

Update 27th October: The contest has been postponed to spring 2021.

Registration

To register, please download the registration form and follow the instructions inside.

Qualification

You can schedule qualification matches where your agent team plays alone in a setting similar to the SampleQualification config. To qualify, your agents have to

• complete one task in each of the two rounds and
• submit most actions in time (i.e. less than 30% “noAction”).

If you do not succeed for some reason, you can attempt again at a later time (provided there is still time).

Connection Tests

After the registration deadline, you can contact us to schedule a connection test, where you can try out your connection to our severs (and possibly identify some issues before the qualification).

Anonymous Test Matches

You can tell us if you’d like to play test matches against other teams (before the contest!). If we find a match, both teams’ identities will be kept secret from each other. The full monitor will of course also be disabled.

The platform

The MASSim server is available on GitHub.

The package contains some dummy agents. You can use them as a starting point or implement the communication protocol yourself.

Prize

The winner of the contest will be awarded a voucher for 500 EUR worth in books, thankfully provided by Springer Verlag. Requirements are the submission of a team description paper and the source code of the agents.

Mailing List

Participants and all interested colleagues are invited to subscribe to our mailing list:

agentcontest@googlegroups.com

All the important details and announcements including scenario and communication protocol specifications as well as software release announcements and bug reports will be shared on this list.

The mailing list archive is publically available.

Publications

After the tournament we invite every participant to submit a paper about their team. Once the quality of the papers has been assured they will be regularly published (as the previous editions) in Springer’s LNCS Challenges subline.

Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates for the preparation of their papers. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship of the papers cannot be made.

• Tentative submission deadline: 1 June 2021
• Submission system: Springer OCS

Please answer and append the questionnaire to your team description paper. Also, please send us a draft version until 21 April. If you’d like to give us some more general feedback (and answer a few questions regarding the organization), there’s also a form for that!

General Advice

We have collected some tips and tricks for participating in the contest. If you have participated before, please send us your additions.

• Make sure your agents can handle transitions between simulations.
• During the contest, only the status monitor will be active. Maybe enable your agents to tell you what’s going on.
• Often, we see agents reconnecting to the server during a simulation. Maybe try to ensure that:
  • your agents do not lose valuable information if they need to be restarted; and
  • they can handle different initial states (e.g., agent is carrying a block).
• Test your agents against other agents (e.g. a second instance of your team).
• Test your agents with different scenario parameters.
• Use the skip() action for each agent who needs to wait a step in order to speed up the simulation.

For the current scenario:

• If an agent is somehow attached to another, it moves together with the other agent. These agents can coordinate their movements to move twice as fast! (One move-action per agent and step.)
• Your agents can start or end up surrounded by obstacles. Make sure they know how to “dig” themselves out.
• Clear actions could also be used to scare away opponent agents.