IJCAI 2013 Symposium on AI in Angry Birds - Call for Papers

August 6-7, 2013, Beijing, China. 

While Angry Birds is a simple game that can be easily understood and played by almost anyone, building a computer program that can play the game as well as humans is a very challenging task. This is partly due to the very large action space of the game -- birds can be released at almost arbitrary rational angles and the tapping time seems continuous -- but also because the outcome of an action is not known in advance without actually executing or simulating it. These two points mean that brute force search and simulation do not seem to be useful for identifying successful solutions.   

Instead, qualitative reasoning and machine learning techniques may be helpful in dealing with the huge search spaces, characterising the properties of objects, and overcoming the uncertainty that comes from noisy object detections or inaccurate physical models. Other AI techniques such as planning or diagnosis may be used for determining good action sequences and for analysing unexpected failures. Overall a large spectrum of AI techniques can be useful in developing a successful AI agent that can play Angry Birds at a human level. Moreover, a combination of methods and techniques from several AI sub-disciplines seems necessary.

The developed solutions could prove to be an important step towards intelligent systems that can deal with real-world situations. While Angry Birds is certainly not a real-world problem, it is more realistic than many scenarios typically studied in AI. 

The IJCAI 2013 Symposium on AI in Angry Birds will be held together with the IJCAI 2013 Angry Birds AI Competition in Beijing, China. The purpose of this symposium is to present original scientific work of high quality related to the problems of developing an intelligent Angry Birds playing agent. Papers must clearly demonstrate, why the proposed approaches are beneficial. This could be based on the available benchmarks or on comparing with the provided sample agent. However, purely theoretical work is also welcome. Authors of submitted papers are encouraged to also submit an agent to the IJCAI 2013 Angry Birds AI Competition in order to demonstrate how well their approaches work. Further details about the competition can be found at aibirds.org.

Papers will be selected based on their originality, significance and relevance, and must be of high quality. Submitted papers will only be reviewed by program committee members and reviewers who do not participate in the IJCAI 2013 Angry Birds AI competition themselves. Papers will not be made available to competing teams and will be treated confidentially. Electronic proceedings will only be made available at the start of the IJCAI 2013 Angry Birds AI competition on August 6. 

Accepted papers will be presented during the IJCAI 2013 Angry Birds AI competition and we will select papers for either long or short presentation. Presentations will be during the IJCAI main conference and can be attended by all conference participants. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for IJCAI 2013 and present the paper at the Symposium. 

 

SUBMISSION 

Papers should be limited to 6 pages plus at most one additional page for references. Papers should include author names and affiliations. 

Submissions should be formatted in PDF according to IJCAI guidelines and submitted by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Formatting guidelines and electronic templates are available on the IJCAI 2013 website: http://ijcai13.org/files/ijcai13.zip.

 

PROCEEDINGS

Electronic proceedings of accepted papers will be published as a technical report on arxiv.org. Authors will retain copyright and papers can be submitted elsewhere. 

 

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Deadline: 
    14 July 2013 (extended). Registered teams can submit papers up to July 19 provided they submit an abstract (title, authors, abstract, keywords) by July 14. 
Acceptance Notification: 
    24 July 2013 
Camera Ready Deadline: 
    28 July 2013
Symposium: 
    6-7 August 2013

 

ORGANISERS:

  • Jochen Renz (Australian National University)
  • Stephen Gould (Australian National University)