The Angry Birds AI Competition

SUMMER 2015 85 The aim of the Angry Birds AI competition (AIBIRDS) is to build intelligent agents that can play novel Angry Birds levels better than the best human players. The competition was initiated in 2012 by the authors of this report and is held in collocation with some of the major AI conferences such as the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2013 and again in 2015, and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence conference in 2014. Angry Birds is a popular physics-based puzzle game developed by the company Rovio that requires players to use a slingshot to shoot birds toward green pigs protected by a physical structure (see figure 1). The actions available to players are simple, the release point (x, y) of the bird from the slingshot and the time (t) after release at which the special power of the bird is activated. A level is solved once all pigs are destroyed; most levels can be solved using up to five birds. Different birds have different behaviors and special powers, and while the player knows the order in which birds will appear on the slingshot, the player cannot manipulate this order. While this intuitively sounds very simple, it is a very hard problem for AI as the action space is continuous and the exact outcome of each action is unknown without simulating it. The built-in physics simulator can deterministically