2009 BotPrize contest

The second BotPrize contest was held at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy on 9 September 2009, as part of the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. The aim of the contest was to see if a computer game playing bot could convince a panel of expert judges that it was actually a human player.

The Judging Panel

  • Marc Atkin - Programmer at 2K Games
  • Garry Greenwood - Editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
  • Mike Preuss - Computational intelligence researcher
  • Peter Cowling - Professor of computer science, specialising in AI
  • Luke Dicken - AI researcher

The Humans

  • Davide Giulivi
  • Luca Galli
  • Diego Martinoia
  • Nicola Basilico
  • Tommy Thompson

The Teams

The finalists were:


Team Affiliation Members
ANU Australian National University, Australia Chris Pelling
UTAustinite University of Texas, Austin, USA
Igor Karpov
Jacob Schrum
Risto Miikulainen
ICE-2009 Ritsumeikan Univerisity, Japan
Daichi Hirono
Akihiro Kojima
Ruck Thawonmas
BradBot individual Thomas Curley
sqlitebot individual Jeremy Cothran

Teams that missed out on the finals were: YCCSA (Adam Nellis, Ed Clark) and Gencelli (Tuze Kuyucu), both from University of York, UK, ISC (Wang Di and Au-Hwee Tan, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Conscious-Robots (Raul Arrabales and Francisco Gonzales, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain), and TooHuman (Frederico Noguira).

Results

None of the bots was able to fool enough judges to take the major prize. But all the bots fooled at least one of the judges.

The most human-like bot was sqlitebot by Jeremy Cothran. The joint runners up were anubot from Chris Pelling and ICE-2009 from the team from Ritsumeikan University, Japan. Jeremy and Chris are both new entrants, and the ICE team were also runners up in 2008.

A transcription of the comments made by judges and confederates is here.

Complete round by round results are here.