About the 2023 Competition

The Angry Birds AI Competition is designed to test the abilities of Angry Birds playing agents on a variety of Angry Birds levels. The competition will be run using a client/server architecture, where the game server runs an instance of Angry Birds Chrome game for each participating Angry Birds agent. Agents run on a client computer and communicate with the server via a given protocol that allows agents to obtain screen shots of their game window from the server at any time. Agents can also obtain the current competition high scores for each level from the server. In return, agents send the server their shooting actions (release coordinate and tap time) which the server will then execute in the corresponding game window. More details about the competition rules and the communication protocol can be found here. A summary of previous Angry Birds AI competitions can be found here. We prepared an overview of the performance of the participating agents that can be used as a comparison. A short paper that summarises the goals and the motivation of the competition is available here. 

The next competition will be the IJCAI 2023 Angry Birds AI Competition which will run over two days during the IJCAI 2023 conference (August 24-25, 2023) in Macao, SAR, China. The number of teams that can enter the competition will be limited. In case a larger number of teams enter the competition than what we can handle in one day, we will run a qualification round the day before the main competition. The organisers reserve the right to end registration early, if the number of registered participants exceeds the number of teams that can be processed during the qualification round.

During the competition, there will be a time limit to play a given set of Angry Birds levels automatically and without any human intervention. All levels of the current round can be accessed at any time. The competition will be played over multiple knock-out rounds. In each round, the agents to achieve the highest combined game score over all levels will proceed to the next round. The agent with the highest combined game score in the grand final will be the winner of the competition. 

Note that the actual game levels used during the competition will not be disclosed to the participants in advance. However, participants will be informed in advance about the birds and the object categories used in the competition game levels, so that their behaviour can be learned in advance. Participants will also receive all past competition levels for training and testing. 

For the second time this year, we will have a Novelty Track, where some of the game objects and their properties are unknown in advance. Agents will only be exposed to game levels containing this novelty after the final version of the agents have been submitted. The Novelty Track will be run using Science Birds instead of Angry Birds Chrome, which also allows for significant speed up of gameplay. 

During the competition, each team will be given the opportunity to briefly introduce their team, their agent, and the methods and strategies used before we run the agent. Participants are encouraged to prepare a poster with this information that will be displayed during the competition. Remote participants can email a poster consisting of up to 9 A4/Letter pages.