Virtual Quidditch: A Challenge Problem for Automatically Programmed Software Agents

Abstract

This paper describes a new challenge prob-lem for the automatic programming of soft-ware agents, a virtual version of the quid-ditch game invented by J. K. Rowling in her best-selling Harry Potter books (Rowl-ing and Grandpre, 1998; Rowling and Whisp, 2001). Good performance in this game re-quires adaptive control in a complex, hetero-geneous, and dynamic 3-dimensional environ-ment. In this short paper we brie°y describe virtual quidditch and the challenges that it presents. A quidditch simulator environment is currently being developed; when it is com-plete it will be made publicly available. 1 VIRTUAL WORLDS FOR AGENT DEVELOPMENT/EVOLUTION Several technical challenges face the designer of a con-trol system for an agent in a complex, dynamic envi-ronment. While the ultimate goal for many researchers is the development of techniques that will enable au-tonomous agents to perform well in the real (physical) world, the di–culties and expense involved in robotics experimentation has led many researchers to test their ideas flrst in game-like virtual environments. Such environments have been host both to hand-coded agents and to agents developed with the aid of automatic programming techniques such as ge-netic programming (Koza, 1992). In particular, ge-netic programming and related techniques have been used to develop agents for TileWorld (Iba, 1999),