A Game AI Competition to foster Collaborative AI research and development

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Geometry Friends Game AI Competition, a challenge designed to advance cooperative and real-time AI research through a physics-based puzzle game emphasizing planning, coordination, and situational awareness.

Contribution

It presents a new cooperative game AI competition focused on real-time planning, coordination, and physics-based problem solving to foster collaborative AI research.

Findings

Current solutions demonstrate progress in cooperative AI strategies

The competition highlights challenges in real-time planning and motion control

The framework facilitates comparison and sharing of AI approaches

Abstract

Game AI competitions are important to foster research and development on Game AI and AI in general. These competitions supply different challenging problems that can be translated into other contexts, virtual or real. They provide frameworks and tools to facilitate the research on their core topics and provide means for comparing and sharing results. A competition is also a way to motivate new researchers to study these challenges. In this document, we present the Geometry Friends Game AI Competition. Geometry Friends is a two-player cooperative physics-based puzzle platformer computer game. The concept of the game is simple, though its solving has proven to be difficult. While the main and apparent focus of the game is cooperation, it also relies on other AI-related problems such as planning, plan execution, and motion control, all connected to situational awareness. All of these must be solved in real-time. In this paper, we discuss the competition and the challenges it brings, and present an overview of the current solutions.