Editorial

This follow-up special issue, “The Multi-Agent Programming Contest: Environment Interface and Contestants in 2010” (edited by Tristan Behrens, Jürgen Dix, Jomi F. Hübner and Michael Köster), contains, besides the descriptions of the approaches used by the 2010 contestants (in the same format as in the first special issue), a paper proposing an environment interface standard. The question of the precise structure of an environment and the interplay between it and an agent system (via some standardized interfaces) is an important one and no consensus is reached yet. The authors discuss this problem thoroughly and work towards a solution. The descriptions of the agent systems used by the contestants in this and the previous special issue follow a template that we asked the contestants to fill out. We believe this makes a comparison between the approaches much easier and helps the reader to understand the differences and similarities. Additionally, each system description ends with a short compilation of the answers to some particular questions. In the rest of the editorial we present the structure of the template and state the questions we wanted the contestants to answer.