Dear Technical Committee,
I have some comments about the changes to the competition you annonced this week.
The first point is not really a modification, since it is the normal competition to change the initial configuration.
However, I have some comments about the second point concerning the change of the sensing property. First of all, it goes against the rules that were adopted for the competition. Changing the rules less than three weeks before the competition is really not good. The number of messages is clearly indicated in the rules and there is no mention that it could be changed. I don't know for the other teams, but for our team, changing the number of messages require a recompilation of our program. Also, since the number of messages is a fareplay rule, it will become even harder to enforce this rule if we are constantly changing it.
If there is still gone a be a sensing competition, we need more specific information to adapt our program:
- Are you going to change the length of the messages?
- Would it be possible to have a different number of messages for each kind of agents? For example, the policeforce could hear 3 messages and the FireBrigade just two.
- Would it be possible to have different number of messages to send and receive? For example, receive only 2 but send 4.
- For the vision, I suppose your are not considering having completly blind agents, that will make them only able to work at random.
And now, for the learning part of the competition. I think it is impossible to do useful learning in only three simulations. The only thing possible in such a short time is simply to record everything you can so the agents won't have to search for the fires or the civilians. This is not interesting learning since there is no generalization, it is simply "hard coded" learning for a specific situation. The information learned would not be interesting for other situations.
I will stop their since my email is already long, but to sum up, my main point is that you are making changes to the competition and the rules of the competition just three weeks before the competition. This is really not good, since we won't have time to do a good job, it will only be backup plans giving uninteresting results.
I don't know if it would change anything, but those are my comments about the last minute changes we received this week.
Sébastien Paquet
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Leader of DAMAS-Rescue
http://www.damas.ift.ulaval.ca/projets/RobocupRescue/index.php
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----- Original Message -----
From: H. Levent AKIN
To: r-resc-l@usc.edu
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 3:44 AM
Subject: Re: new tests in competition
Dear All
As you know in order to foster new avenues of research, we are trying to
consider different issues in the agent competition. This year in
addition to the classical competition we will consider cases where the
abilities of the agents and the teams are reduced and see how the teams
cope with these increasingly difficult conditions. We tend to make the
games increasingly difficult in each stage of the games: preliminaries,
semi-finals and finals.
We consider two different situations:
-By changing initial configuration: The competition difficulty can be
increased by increasing the number of fires and trapped civilians and
perhaps by reducing the number of agents, or by placing agents trapped
in buildings.
-By changing sensing properties: We also consider increasing difficulty
by making the communication to become less reliable - easy would be 4
messages of 256 bytes, medium is 2 messages and hard is zero messages,
and we also consider limiting visibility.
We will also have learning: Here on the same random map three
consecutive runs will be made and based on the difference of the score
of the 3rd and 1st run teams will be ordered.
I will send a message later on how to prepare the necessary files to
bring to the competition.
Best Regards
Michael Brenner wrote:
> Hello Technical Committee,
>
> thanks for sending the competition schedule to the team leaders. It
> looks very promising (especially "Food and Drink" on June 28).
> Could you please elaborate a bit on the new "tests" on day 2 and day 3
> of the Rescue competition?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Michael
>
>
--
===================================================================
H.Levent Akin [] To acquire knowledge and
Department of Computer Engineering [] communicate it to others
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34342 Bebek-Istanbul [] pleasure, and business of
TURKEY [] my life.
[] -William Harvey
[]
Phone: +90 (212) 359 6769 []
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E-Mail:akin@boun.edu.tr []
URL:http://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~akin []
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