Shall We Play a Game? A computer only DEFCON tournament!

Posted Jun 22 2009, 02:02 PM

ROCHESTER, New York -- June 22, 2009 -- The echoing robotic voice of Joshua from the 1983 classic "War Games" asking the simple question "Shall we play a game?" might now be a reality. Not in the idea that a robot controlling nuclear weapons might destroy our world, as that's likely been true for quite some time. In the upcoming  IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games  you might not be sure if it's a person or a computer attempting to wipe your population off the thermonuclear battlefield.

IEEE's Symposium has created an interesting competition for this year, and we are proud to say that they will be basing it around Ambrosia's own DEFCON.

The idea is simple, contestants program an AI to play DEFCON and then pitch their bot against enemy bots in a series of one-on-one thermonuclear chess games. The winner is the programmer whose bot successfully annihilates its opponents and racks up the highest death count. IEEE is offering a $500 prize to the deadliest DEFCON AI bot competition winner.  Secondly, part of the symposium is a sort of “Turing Test” challenge, in which contestants then demonstrate their programmed AI against non-computer foes. The objective is to try to trick a panel of human judges into thinking the AI is a human player.

The symposium will be held Sept 7-10 in at Politecnico Di Milano, Milano, Italy. 

To read more please visit their site here.