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Conscious-Robots team wins the 2K BotPrize 2010 competition!!!

Written by Raúl Arrabales

Sunday, 29 August 2010

Conscious-Robots team is the 2K BotPrize 2010 Competition Winner!!!

The third edition of the 2K BotPrize Competition was decided recently in Copenhagen, at the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. We are happy to announce that the Spanish team – Conscious-Robots – formed by Jorge Muñoz and Raúl Arrabales won this year edition of this competition, a Turing Test adapted to the domain of videogames [1].

2K BotPrize Winners. Raúl Arrabales (left) and Jorge Muñoz (right)

Raúl Arrabales (left) and Jorge Muñoz (right) with the 2K BotPrize trophy (by Peter Reynolds)

The aim of the 2K BotPrize competition is to develop a computer game bot which is undistinguishable from a human player, i.e. able to pass the Turing Test. Although the Conscious-Robots bot could not completely pass the Turing Test, she achieved a humanness rating of 31.8%. As of today, the Turing Test level intelligence has never been achieved by a machine. However, this year the gap between humans and bots was reduced, having a small difference between the Conscious-Robots bot (31.8%) and the least “human” human player (35.4%) – see results. -> READ MORE.

The bot developed by the Conscious-Robots team (CCBot2 or “CERA-CRANIUM Bot 2”) runs the CERA-CRANIUM cognitive architecture [2], which is based on a computational model of consciousness. The CERA-CRANIUM model is one of the results of a research line on Machine Consciousness carried out by Raúl Arrabales during the last 4 years. CERA-CRANIUM design is based on the Global Workspace Theory [3]. CCBot2 is a Java implementation of this architecture specifically developed by Jorge Muñoz and Raúl Arrabales for the 2K BotPrize 2010 competition [4].

2K BotPrize Final Competition Session at CIG 2010

Final session of the 2K BotPrize Competition at ITU Copenhagen during CIG-2010

Additional information

- 2K Marin, creators of games like the award winning BioShock are the sponsors of the BotPrize Competition, and part of 2K Games, who recently launched the game Mafia II.

- The BotPrize competition was organized and managed by Philip Hingston.

About the team members

Jorge Muñoz

Jorge Muñoz is a researcher in Artificial Intelligence at the Carlos III Univesity of Madrid (UC3M). He is currently pursuing a PhD in imitation learning in video games. He has published 5 papers and co-researched in projects like “Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists detection system: sensor fusion” (TRA-2007-67374-C02-02; 2007/09), supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; and "Trainutri. Training and Nutrition senior social platform" funded by the European Union, Programm Ambient Assisted Living. He also has won several competitions related with Artificial Intelligence in video games: the Car Setup Optimization Competition (EvoStar 2010), the Car Racing Competition (WCCI 2010) and BotPrize (CIG 2010). Jorge Muñoz holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and Technology and a B.Sc. in Computer Science (graduated with first class honors), both from UC3M.

Raúl Arrabales

Raúl Arrabales is a researcher in the area of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), Spain. He is currently working as teaching assistant and has recently submitted his PhD in Machine Consciousness. He has published over 20 papers on Machine Consciousness and Cognitive Robotics and he is co-researcher in several AI research projects supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union. Prior to joining UC3M, he worked as project manager and IT consultant for several technologically oriented companies. Raul Arrabales holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and Technology, a B.Sc. in Computer Science, both from UC3M, and a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM).

References

[1] Philip Hingston. A Turing Test for Computer Game Bots, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI In Games, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp 169-186, September 2009.

[2] Arrabales, R. Ledezma, A. and Sanchis, A. "CERA-CRANIUM: A Test Bed for Machine Consciousness Research". International Workshop on Machine Consciousness 2009. Hong Kong. June 2009.

[3] Baars, B.J. 1988. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness: Cambridge University Press. (About GWT).

[4] Arrabales, R. Ledezma, A. and Sanchis, A. "Towards Conscious-like Behavior in Computer Game Characters", in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games 2009 (CIG-2009) pp. 217-224. ISBN 978-1-4244-4815-9.