Akbaba—An Agent for the Angry Birds AI Challenge Based on Search and Simulation

In this paper, we report on our entry for the AI Birds competition, where we designed, implemented, and evaluated an agent for the physics puzzle computer game Angry Birds. Our agent uses search and simulation to find appropriate parameters for launching birds. While there are other methods that focus on qualitative reasoning about physical systems we try to combine simulation and adjustable abstractions to efficiently traverse the possibly infinite search space. The agent features a hierarchical search scheme where different levels of abstractions are used. At any level, it uses simulation to rate subspaces that should be further explored in more detail on the next levels. We evaluate single components of our agent and we also compare the overall performance of different versions of our agent. We show that our approach yields a competitive solution on the standard set of levels.

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