2016 Competition Results

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Team BamBirds from the University of Bamberg, Germany is the new AIBIRDS Champion. Congratulations to Diedrich Wolter and his team, very well done!

 

The competition started with a Qualification Round where we determined the ranking of the agents for the Quarter Finals. We had three new agents this year, HeartyTian from the University of Waterloo, BamBirds and SEABirds from the Technical University of Dresden. HeartyTian performed extremely well and was far ahead of all other teams in the Qualification Round. The two finalists from AIBIRDS 2015, DataLab Birds and AngryHex were second and third. BamBirds was last as they had a small bug in their program. All teams had the option to submit an updated version of their agent for the Quarter Finals. HeartyTian and BamBirds made use of this option, with drastically different outcomes.

In Quarter Final 1 all three new teams were playing and it was a big surprise that HeartyTian suddenly didn't perform well anymore and only finished third. Experienced team S-Birds from Dhirubhai Ambani IICT in India who already participated a few times was last, which already gave an indication about how good the new teams were. SEABirds won QF1 ahead of BamBirds.

Quarter Final 2 featured the heavy weights of the past competitions, defending champion DataLab Birds and AngryHex the second best team from last year. Team IHSEV from ENIB in France who already participated a few times clearly dominated this round and was way ahead of the other teams. AngryHex who was one of the favourites to win this year seemed to have a strange strategy. The kept solving the same levels they have solved already rather than trying to solve levels they haven't solved yet. They finally managed to solve another level and this would have qualified them for the semi finals, eliminating BamBirds, but they were too late and the winning shot happened 3 seconds after the cut off time. These were extremely exciting moments and team BamBirds could not believe their luck.

The Semi Final between IHSEV, DataLab Birds, BamBirds and SeaBirds was equally exciting. Not so much for the top spot, as team IHSEV was again dominating the round, but for who would take the second spot in the Grand Final. It was very close between DataLab and BamBirds. Both teams were present and tension was very high as the ranking changed whenever a new level was solved. In the end the dominance of team DataLab Birds in our competition ended and they were eliminated. 

IHSEV went into the Grand Final as the clear favourite. But as levels got harder, their agent which is based on advanced simulation techniques suddenly did not perform so well anymore. BamBirds which is based on a combination of different good old fashioned AI techniques such as qualitative spatial reasoning and planning took the lead early and never gave it away. 

Results after Qualification

 

 

Quarter Final 1

 

 

1. HeartyTian

576650

 

1. SEABirds

328570

2. AngryHex

553720

 

2. BamBirds

280390

3. Datalab Birds

550810

 

3. HeartyTian

252100

4. SEABirds

403190

 

4. s-Birds

182970

5. S-Birds

372890

 

6. Naive Agent

293020

 

7. IHSEV

290770

 

Quarter Final 2

 

8. BamBirds

60000

 

 

 

 

1. IHSEV

470940

 

 

 

2. DataLab Birds

327490

 

 

 

3. Naive Agent

232880

 

 

 

4. AngryHex

231300

 

Semi Final

 

Grand Final

 

 

1. IHSEV

562820

 

1. BamBirds

451250

2. BamBirds

406200

 

2. IHSEV

288720

3. DataLab Birds

371100

 

4. SEABirds

293410