In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial time. In addition, we show that finding the minimal number of games that need to be thrown to manipulate the result can also be determined in polynomial time. ...

Robotics competitions are an educational tool at the middle school, high school, and university levels. The layout, rules, and reward systems of these competitions galvanize students to a specific solution space. From our experiences competing-in and designing such competitions, open-loop, low feedback strategies tend to dominate the winner's circle. If we want competitions to emphasize solutio...

The purpose of our research was to investigate the relative frequencies of different types of basketball shots (above head, hook shot, layup, dunk, tip-in), some details about their technical execution (one-legged, two-legged, drive, cut, …), and shot success in different levels of basketball competitions. We analysed video footage and categorized 5024 basketball shots from 40 basketball games ...

The RoboCup Rescue Robot and Simulation competitions have been held since 2000. The experience gained during these competitions has increased the maturity level of the field, which allowed deploying robots after real disasters (e.g. Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster). This article provides an overview of these competitions and highlights the state of the art and the lessons

We identify aspects of computing competition formats as they relate to the purpose of these competitions, both stated and tacit. We consider the major international competitions – the International Olympiad for Informatics, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and top coder – and related contests whose format merits consideration. We consider the operational impact and possible...

The M3-Competition continues to improve the design of forecasting competitions: It examines more series than any previous competition, improves error analyses and includes commercial forecasting programs as competitors. To judge where to go from here, I step back to look at the M-Competitions as a whole. I discuss the advantages of the M-Competitions in hopes that they will be retained, describ...

Autonomous mobile robots have been extensively studied not only as an element of industrial and home automation, but also as a test bed in Robocup competitions to academically establish the achievement of artificial intelligence. One of the essential and critical research areas in autonomous robotics is the learning ability which supports robots to autonomously navigate and adapt to a given env...

The master thesis describes an intelligent agent developed for power trading in the tar-iff market. First, the theoretical background related to the motivation for switching fromtraditional grids to Smart Grids is presented. The thesis continues with the simulation plat-forms for agents and the key implications of real-world tariff design and principles. Lastly,the complete arch...

In this paper we present the approaches and contributions of team homer@UniKoblenz that were developed for and applied during the RoboCup@Home competitions. In particular, we highlight the different abstraction layers of our software architecture that allows for rapid application development based on the ROS actionlib. This architectural design enables us to focus on the development of new algo...