Computers are superbly fast and accurate at playing games, but can they be programmed to be more fun to play - to play like you and me? People like to play against opponents who are like themselves - opponents with personality, who can surprise, who sometimes make mistakes, yet don't blindly make the same mistakes over and over. The BotPrize competition challenges programmers/researchers/hobbyists to create a bot for UT2004 (a first-person shooter) that can fool opponents into thinking it is another human player. The competition has been sponsored by 2K games since 2008, and the $5000 major prize is yet to be claimed.
Human-like Bots competition for WCCI 2012
A Human-like Bots competition with a cash prize (provided by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society) will be run at the 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence in Brisbane, Australia (June 10-15 2012). The format will similar to the BotPrize, so intending BotPrize competitors can use it as a warm-up. For more details, go here.
2011 BotPrize decided - humans are still more human (just)
Once again the competition asks: Can a computer be programmed to seem to have personality, fallibility and cunning? Can computers play like people? Once again, the answer is "No, computers can't play like people ... yet.".
The winning bot was ICE-CIG2011 by the team from Ritsumeikan University, Japan. The best judge was Mike Preuss, from TU Dortmund University, Germany (Mike was also best judge in 2009). Results are available on the results page. Two teams were very close, with both achieving record humanness scores. The gap with epic bots has all but closed.
