Results of the 2013 Man vs Machine Challenge

We set up 8 computer were people could play. Humans played first from 10am to 4.30pm. It was a very popular event and most of the time all computers were occupied.

Every participant had to solve 5 Angry Birds levels in 15 minutes. The levels were very hard and some humans solved only one of them while others gave up. The very best players solved all five levels.

At 4.30pm the three winning AI agents from the 2013 Angry Birds AI Competition were started.
The best of them solved only two levels. Therefore:

The winner of the 2013 Man vs Machine Challenge is A HUMAN!!!!

Qiang Chen (陈强) from Wuhan had the highest score and won the Man vs Machine prize of USD 500. Second place went to Liu Lu, third place to Menkes van den Briel, fourth place to Alex Kautz, and fifth place to Wei Li. Well done humans!

It is good to see that we are still better at playing Angry Birds than AI and Angry Birds remains a very challenging problem for Artificial Intelligence. It seems that AI at the moment is clearly better than beginners, but cannot yet match the experience of the best human players.

 

A big THANK YOU to all the participants. We hope to see you again in 2014 for an even more exciting Man vs Machine Challenge.

Humans: keep practising

AI Researchers, Developers, Enthusiasts, Hobbyists, Students and anyone else who would like to contribute, you can download our basic game playing software and start adding your own Angry Birds strategies to it or put some AI techniques to the test. Let's see how good we can be in 2014!

 

Jochen Renz, XiaoYu (Gary) Ge and Stephen Gould