CSM-423 - Evolutionary Solo Pong Players

An Internet Java Applet http://www.cs.essex.ac.uk/staff/poli/ SoloPong/ allows users anywhere to play the Solo Pong game. We compare people’s performance to a hand coded “Optimal” player and programs automatically produced by artificial intelligence. The AI techniques are: genetic programming, including a hybrid of GP and a human designed algorithm, and a particle swarm optimiser. The AI approaches are not fine tuned. GP and PSO find good players. Evolutionary computation (EC) is able to beat both human designed code and human players.