Playground for Artificial Intelligence?

Question

In school, one of my professors had created a 3D game (not just an engine), where all the players were entirely AI-controlled, and it was our assignment to program the AI of a single player. We were basically provided an API to interact with the game world.

Our AI implementations were then dropped into the game together, and we watched as our programs went to battle against each other.

It was like robot soccer, but virtual, with lots of big guns, and no soccer ball.

I'm now looking for anything similar (and open source) to play with. (Preferably in Java, but I'm open to any language.) I'm not looking for a game engine, or a framework... I'm looking for a complete game that simply lacks AI code... preferably set up for this kind of exercise. Suggestions?

Answer 1

This sounds very similar to Robocode.

Robocode is a programming game, where the goal is to develop a robot battle tank to battle against other tanks in Java or .NET. The robot battles are running in real-time and on-screen.

Answer 2

You may want to check out AIIDE in 2010, where they will be hosting a Starcraft Broodwar AI competition. You can download the software, API, and proxies to allow you to connect your homegrown AI into the Broodwar simulation.

Unlike other platforms such as 3D Robocup, the Broodwar engine will handle the physics, and will probably allow you to focus most of your time on higher level aspects such as path planning, strategy, resource allocation, etc. There are also basic forms of AI that you can plop in as placeholders while you work on your specific improvement, say a melee AI for example.