Acknowledgments from the 2013 Organisers
Many people and organisations have helped us in making this competition successful.
We would like to thank Toby Walsh for encouraging us to having this competition at IJCAI and for his strong support leading up to the event.
We thank IJCAI for sponsoring some of our students and for offering all the facilities to host the competition. We particularly thank the IJCAI conference committee Francesca Rossi, Sebastian Thrun and Vesna Sabljatovic and the IJCAI local organiser Derong Liu for their continuous support and help with organisation. Thanks to Hao Lu for assisting us throughout the event.
We thank the Artificial Intelligence Journal editorial board for their generous sponsorship. We also thank the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University for their encouragement and for agreeing to let us spend lots of time on this competition. Jochen Renz and Stephen Gould are both supported by a Fellowship from the Australian Research Council which is gratefully acknowledged.
Thanks also to Shalom Tang and his colleagues from Rovio for their help and support.
Many thanks go to our excellent students, Peng Zhang and Andrew Wang for their countless contributions and countless hours. Thanks also to some our former students who contributed to our software infrastructure, in particular Jim Keys, Sahan Abeyasinghe and Sebastian Beswick.
Even though our PhD student Gary Ge moved to the rank of organiser this year, he still deserves a very special thank you and the highest praise. Without his extremely hard work and dedication, almost day and night for weeks and months, this competition would not have been possible.
Last but not least, thanks to all the participants for taking up our challenge. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did and will participate again next year with even better agents.
Jochen Renz, XiaoYu (Gary) Ge and Stephen Gould
(Angry Birds AI Competition Organisers, 2013)
