interesting web pages

I also keep track of some less-interesting pages.

games

Breeding Software to Play the Game of Go
A new attempt by Jeffrey Greenberg to write a go program using genetic programming.

Computer draughts and checkers
Information from Michel Grimminck about many programs and projects. The champion program Truus, by Stef Keetman, and Grimminck's program Dragon learn tactical patterns. See the sub-page Automated learning of tactical patterns in draughts.

Computer Go by David Mechner
A page with several good articles.

Computer Poker Research Group
A group at the University of Alberta, Canada. Their programs include Loki and Pokibot. Opponent modeling, which requires learning, is important in poker.

FanG - Genetic Boardgame by Mark Fleig
FanG is a free Windows program which plays "a variant of the Fandango boardgame" using genetic programming. It comes with a genetic programming user interface so you can watch the population of players evolve.

Genetic Mastermind
You can play Mastermind against a genetic algorithm on this web page from the GeNeura Team. This is not a pre-evolved playing program; the genetic algorithm runs during play with a population of candidate solutions. A new version of this program, at a new URL, was announced in May 1999. You can download C++ source.

Hossa - A Chess Program
Steffen A. Jakob
Hossa uses an opening book learning algorithm similar to the offline algorithms used by othello programs.

Programming a Bolo Robot: Recognizing Actions by Example
Andy Wilson and Stephen Intille modified a robot player for the tank game Bolo to be a learning ally to a human player. The robot tank follows a human-controlled tank around, and with the aid of hints from the human learns to help the human out.

Table Tennis Simulator using Neural Networks
Diego d'Aulignac and Angelos Moschovinos, under supervision of Simon Lucas of the University of Essex, wrote a table tennis simulator and neural network controllers to play table tennis (aka ping pong). You can write your own players; a competition is planned for sometime this year.

Tron
A genetic programming system, competing online against humans, is learning to play a simple video game. You can play against it.

learning competitions

The ASCII Robot Soccer Homepage
This is a soccer-like simulation game played on an ASCII "field". Tucker Balch at the Georgia Institute of Technology designed the game and wrote referee software; you write a team to play. He provides C source code for unix machines. A "World Championship" tournament is planned. Some teams use machine learning techniques.

HQ
Michael Gherrity
A Java applet controlling a board game for two programs (humans can play too). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a ranking or even a list of contestants. See also the old version.

Robot Auto Racing Simulator (RARS)
An open programming competition involving a virtual car race. Some of the contestants are tuned by learning algorithms. See the student projects RARS Driver by Averill, Bucken, and Nelson, and Reinforcement Learning and RARS by de Ridder and Tax.

First International RoShamBo Programming Competition
Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition
Write a program to play Rock-Paper-Scissors. Deadline: 10 July 2000. The discussion of the results is surprisingly interesting.

research groups

Complex Games Lab
A research group at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. They concentrate on bridge, go, shogi, and soccer.

Computer Games Group
A research group at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands.

Computer Games Research Institute
A research group at Shizuoka University in Japan.

GAMES Research Group
A research group at the University of Alberta in Canada. You can play against some of their programs on their web site.

UMASS Machine Learning Laboratory
A group at the University of Massachusetts which does some work in evaluation function learning. They offer unix software to play automated internet tournaments for the games of othello and hearts.

other projects

Proverb: The Probabilistic Cruciverbalist
PROVERB: The Crossword-Solving Computer Program
The first program to solve American-style crossword puzzles. The program's many expert modules suggest candidate answers to the clues, and a grid-filling algorithm takes the suggestions as starting points for the final solution.

Karl Sims' Creatures
This page is about artificial "creatures" evolved by Karl Sims. He wrote an A-Life '94 paper, "Evolving 3D morphology and behavior by competition" (PDF format; also available as compressed postscript, from this artificial life page) which is about evolving creatures which compete for control of a cube in a virtual world. One issue it brings up is this: when you're co-evolving competing species, which individuals in which species should compete to decide their fitness? Tom Ray's take is at Karl Sims -- Virtual Creatures.

Project: Von Neumann
An ambitious open collaborative project to write a free shoot-em-up video game in which the enemies evolve by genetic programming.

Zillions of Games
A commercial program which accepts game rules in a LISP-like format and plays the game. Play is "strong", according to the company. They don't provide many details about how it works.