Environment for MKT2
W.Pasman, 29 april 2009
Introduction
The first year project "Media & Kennistechnologie" (MKT2) aims at learning students
about artificial intelligence and let them put their knowledge into practice. The students
are working in groups of 5 or 6 students. To let students put their knowledge into
practice, the plan is to provide them with GOAL and an environment in which they can
run their agents. The environment should encourage and motivate the students. This
document discusses a number of alternatives.
Requirements
Requirements for the environment came from earlier slides from Iwein Borm and
personal discussions with Koen Hindriks and Birna van Riemsdijk. We came to the
following list of requirements:
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Multi-agent: each team needs multiple agents, each with its own specialization.
The idea behind this is that the agents work together as a team.
Graphics nice looking for first-year computer science students.
Competition between the agents of various groups
Environment stable: very well tested and used by others
challenge: vague but real problem without well-defined path to solution. No
advanced game tree search methods should be required for a good strategy.
Simple, straightforward environment interface.
No violence (Koen is afraid that some pacifict might boycot the exercise).
Enough work to keep five first-year students busy for 3 ECTS (3*18=54 hours per
person)
a full tournament should be run in a few hours to 1 day.
I would like to notice right away that most (computer science?) students that I see in the
canteen love to play first person shooters like Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor etc. By
deciding against violence we seem to reject the precise category our target group likes
best. Also these FPS are interesting for team play, and well suited for multi-agent, so I
think we are missing an opportunity here.
Multi-Player Computer games
An obvious starting point is to look at multi-player games. On mpogd.com we find an
interesting and pretty complete overview into the following categories:
 action. In 99% of the hundreds of games in this category that I checked warfare is
part of the game. In many cases the title is enough to guess it contains violence
("army, violence, defeat, combat, dead, warrior, siege..."). In some, violence is a
small part of the game or intended to be funny (eg, hit the worms in your garden)
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but I assume we still have to drop these. Of the remaining ones, a few are not
competetive (e.g. "moon base" and "club marian" where you customize your
character, go for a drive and explore the island. You can chat with people from
around the world, do a little smash up derby and dance with your friends in this
new 3D persistent world.). This leaves us with sport games as racing, hockey,
baseball, and some variations of existing sports like space hockey (uniballcentral.net).
board. It seems that even many board games could be classified as "violence".
Many board games play some war, including armies, tanks etc. But also many
more traditional board games such as stratego, checkers and chess you also have
to defeat your opponent by killing his pieces. There seems not much difference
between having a stronger piece on the board or a stronger spaceship or a more
powerful incantation to play with. Board games are usually turn taking unlike the
action games that are real-time.
card. card games. I did not look at these.
classic. This contains many games that could be just as will in other categories,
like Backgammon Bingo, Bridge, Chess, go, etc. Four-in-a-Row is one that seems
to fit best here.
flight sim. In multiplayer flight sims you do a dogfight against other players
(either with planes or with spacecraft). Allegiance is an extreme version where
you play together with up to 200 other players and must well organize your
attacks. In Astrobattle your main job is to design and program your battle ship.
Some variants combine flight sim with trading to earn money and extend your
ship (eg, Jump gate), leading to overlap with the role-playing category.
Multi-user Dungeon. In MUDS you play a character of your choice, either
normal life roles like manager, militair or priest, or fantasy figure like elves,
dragons, trolls, giants. You "improve" your character by killing, getting gold,
getting experience, and going to other levels. MUDS are text-based, no fancy
graphics.
role playing. Not unlike MUDS but with graphics and a higher fraction of these
are more non-violent. There are quite some games targeting young girls,
something I did not notice in the other categories. For instance 5street is a bit like
the Sims: have your character buy fashion and get dressed nicely, dance, buy pets,
They organize dance competitions and video creation contests. In avirtualhorse
you breed horses, get a job as a vet, play horse games, build a range, etc. In angels
online you enter in the angel lyceum. Your tutor assigns some quests to you.
Adventures also fall in this category. For instance in Tale in the Desert III your
character advances by completing, participating in, or leading large projects.
Negotiation and politics play a very large role in how the game is played out.
There are thousands of games in this category, I quickly browsed the titles and
scanned maybe 10% of it in more detail.
sports. Any sport you can imagine, soccer, fighting, racing, dancing, skating, deer
hunting. Also includes "manager" games where you manage some sport, buying
players, setting tactics etc.
strategy. Mostly games where you manage, for instance battle strategy, politics,
city state management. Some play in a medieval setting, others in world war 1 or

2, others in current time, yet others far in the future in interstellar space. There are
thousands of games in this category, I checked a few %.
puzzle. This category seems to contain a remainder of board games, adventures,
action and word puzzles.
On http://www.spogg.com/ there are some interesting attempts to turn a single-player or
turn-taking game into a multiplayer action game. For instance they modified solitaire,
tetris, scrabble (see also mrallen.com/scramble and scrabulous.com) and crossword
puzzles.
I am amazed that I can not find any multi-player medical simulator. My idea here was
that there is a good amount of specialization in medical operations like surgery and first
aid, and that this might naturally lead to cooperating agents in a simulator environment.
However, all the medical simulators that I can find are single player. One, 911
Paramedic, reports that you are cooperating with a partner, but all reviews I found talk as
if this is a single-player game just like the others. See also [Koster06] and [Ismith06].
Games: first analysis
Most action games contain violence and have to be dropped. Most remaining ones do not
have a competitive element. We are left with sports games like hockey, skating, racing
(grand prix, drag racing, etc), and some odd variants of sports like space hockey (uniballcentral.net). Team sports like football and hockey seem a promising category. In the
racing games that I am aware of there is no real team cooperation (multiple cars racing as
groups against each other), every racer is on his own.
Many board games have violent aspects, I'm not sure whether Koen would accept them.
A problem with board games is that the number of players is very limited, it seems hard
to turn those into a challenging multi-agent problem. Card games seem to have the same
problem, which is why I did not look at card games.
Games I found in the classic category, like Backgammon Bridge and Chess need game
tree analysis to let a computer play such a game well. Also you play these with two or
four players only, hence lack the multi-agent aspect.
Flight simulators revolve about dogfighting hence fail the non-violence requirement.
MUDs also have violence (although unnessecary, I did not encounter any without
violence) and are out.
In the role playing category there is quite some choice without violence. Unfortunately
quite some of them are for young girls, not exactly our target audience. Also many lack a
competition aspect. But of the remaining role plays the acquired level, status and wealth
might be used as a basis for a multi-player competition. Creating teams in a RPG seems
to give interesting possibilities.
Sports. In the action category we already touched upon a number of sports that seem to
meet our requirements.
Strategy. In the traditional strategy games like SimCity, Settlers and various Tycoons, the
player is the general manager making the strategic decisions. In a multi-player strategy
game however multiple managers could compete. I imagine that all agents start as
standard citizens, and that each team is allowed to add say 10 new citizens that may
cooperate to get to important positions. The citizens vote regularly and might start riots if
their city gets mis-managed. Final score might be a function of popularity of your agents,
wellfare of the city (cities), etc. I assume these games can run much faster than the usual
pace, so that it would be possible to play a game that could take multiple days in just one
day.
Selected games in detail
After the above crude selection, this section selects and focuses on a few games.
Team Sports
There are numerous team sports that seem to fit the requirements. We compare a few,
where we focus on soccer as this appeared a succes for the MKT2 project in the previous
years.
Space Hockey
Just to show that there are many team sports and also variations of those that fit the
requirements, I start with a variant of hockey: space hockey [UniBall09]. In space
hockey, you maneuver, you pass and you shoot in order to score goals. But instead of
steering hockeyers, you steer a small spacecraft with two boosters and all collisions are
elastic. Key to making a goal is good teamwork.
Figure 1. UniBall Space Hockey
Fleeble Soccer
In previous years, the MKT2 project used multi-agent soccer. 2x7 agents play soccer
against each other. The advantage of this is that we have all the source code. Apparently
fleeble has its own custom implementation of soccer, it does not link to any international
competition like RoboCup. Also it does not allow real robots to be attached. Also the
simulator only has a 2D view, while most current soccer simulators provide 3D views on
the arena.
Figure 2. Current soccer simulator built in Fleeble
RoboCup Soccer
There is an international football competition via RoboCup (http://www.robocup.org).
Amongst others, they have two simulation leagues where computer agents compete in.
One is robocup soccer, the other robocup rescue (below). Robocup soccer simulator is
available via http://sserver.sourceforge.net/downloads.html. A quick scan of the manual
shows that all agents have "percepts" of the fields and a large range of actions and
sensors including auditory. The simulator and the visualization module are provided as
free separate modules. There is a 2D and a 3D viewer available (Figures below).
Figure 3. 2D view on the robocup soccer simulator. From [NTT09]
Figure 4. 3D view of robocup soccer simulator. From [NTT09]
In order to get this running with GOAL, we need to connect GOAL to Unreal game
engine. The ability to connect GOAL to unreal seems a good idea to get students
motivated.
Via the USARSim (Unified System for Automation and Robotics Simulation) it is
possible to hook up real robots to RoboCup Rescue [Balaguer08]. The first version ran
directly on Unreal 2 game engine. The advantages of this are that the Unreal 2 game
engine has a built-in physics simulator that is developed and improved rapidly, and that
the Unreal Ed bundle that allows creation, import and export of complex geometry and
textures. It is not clear how realistic this sim is, for instance the "Karma Mass Test"
indicates serious deviations from real physical behaviour [Zaratti06] such as a
gravitational constant that is twice its expected value on earth, and a time scale factor of
1.1. It is not exactly clear which platforms are supported by USARSim, some mention
"windows only", some Windows and Linux [Wang09], while [Carpin07] states that it it
system independent and that OSX is also supported.
It is not clear to me which parts of Unreal would be needed and if we can distribute them
with an Unreal-based environment in a single installer for GOAL.
Instead of trying to hook GOAL to the unreal engine in order to connect to Robocup, it
may be a good idea to hook into Gamebots (http://gamebots.planetunreal.gamespy.com).
Gamebots is a modification to Unreal Tournament that allows characters in the game to
be controlled via network sockets connected to other programs. The advantage of this
would be that we use existing and well developed and supported software to connect
GOAL to unreal, instead of creating this software ourselves. It is not clear to me whether
we could do this and still connect to the robocup soccer simulator. But at least gamebots
is supported for Mac, Linux and Win32 (not Win64 apparently) [Kaminka02]. The
USARSim seems to use a modified version of gamebots [Wang05].
There are other ways to connect GOAL to robots, for instance MobileSim
[MobileSim09], Gazebo [USCRobotics09], Gostai, and Webots. MobileSim is based on
Stage [Stage06] hence is 2D. Gazebo [Gazebo06] is 3D. Matthew Johnson thinks Gostai
does not yet support enough robots to be useful for him. Delving deeper into this is out of
the scope of this report.
As a sidenote, I think that most football sim fans will be disappointed with the simulation
renderings above. For comparison, the figure below shows a rendering from fifa09
[FIFA09], a current state of the art football simulator.
Figure 5. Screen snapshot from fifa [FIFA09]
Robocup Rescue
The RoboCup Rescue website has numerous simulators, a 2002 version in various
versions, a 2003 version, a number of disaster simulators, traffic simulators etc. The UvA
also is building a simulator for large scale urban disaster scenarios, referring also the
RoboCup rescue. I discuss two main tracks: the Virtual Robot Simulation and the Rescue
Agents.
Virtual Robot Simulation
As with Robocup Soccer, the RoboCup Rescue Virtual Robot Simulation
[RobocupRescue07] runs on Unreal engine and can be connected via the USARSim. The
UvA in Amsterdam organizes the 2009 competition. I did not find information about
what the competition is exactly about. It seems the competition involves mainly
comparing how well the various teams managed to act in the disaster, there is no direct
competition between rescue teams.
There is a company in Delft [e-Semble07] that makes nice renderings of rescue actions,
we might consider cooperating with them. They also work on safety and security issues,
and road and traffic organisation, both for training emergency scenarios as for support
during design.
Figure 6. Snapshot from RoboCup Rescue Virtual Robot Simulation
Figure 7. Snapshots from e-Semble simulations.
RoboCup Rescue - Rescue Agents
This simulator is simulating an urban disaster situation with four elements: burning
buildings, dying civilians, emergency workers, and a road network connecting them all
[RescueAgents09]. Competitors are expected to provide software contributions which
interact with this disaster-simulation code in real time for exactly five minutes. The
objective is to maximize the extent to which the buildings remain standing, and the extent
to which civilians and emergency workers remain unharmed.
There are civilians and platoon agents acting in the simulator. The civillians are to be
rescued, the platoon agents are the ones controlled by the competitor's software. The
platoon agents come in three types: ambulance team, fire brigade and police force.
The code is in C and Java (http://www.sf.net/projects/roborescue). The plan viewer is in
Java, maybe making the integration with goal probably a bit easie; but most is in C.
Communication between C and Java seems via TCP sockets, which also may easen the
issues. The code base is small (a few Mb) and in all this seems not too hard to connect to
GOAL.
Figure 8. Robocup rescue Agents simulation. From [RescueAgents09].
Multi Agent Contest
Utrecht university and the Technical University of Clausthal organize a yearly multiagent contest [Dastani07, Dastani09]. The typical scenario (2006) looks like this: two
small teams of gold miners find themselves exploring the same area, avoiding trees and
bushes and competing for the gold nuggets spread around the woods. The gold miners of
each team coordinate their actions in order to collect as much gold as they can and to
deliver it to the trading agent located in a depot where the gold is safely stored. More
recent scenarios tend towards a more dynamic world. The code is all in Java. Usually the
agents are in one of two modes: exploring or collecting gold, and there may be a leader
coordinating the search. Other than that there is not much differentiation in the agents.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Figure 9. Left: Screen snapshot from the 2007 multi-agent contest where two teams
of agents collect gold. Right: snapshot from the 2009 contest where two teams try to
catch cows.
Agent Trading Competition (TAC)
The trading agent community [TAC09] has defined two trading agent competition games:
the TAC SCM and the TAC Classic.
TAC SCM
TAC SCM was designed to capture many of the challenges involved in supporting
dynamic supply chain practices (Figure). It runs on Java 2 SE version 1.4.
A TAC SCM game (see Figure 10) consists of a number of \days" or rounds where six
personal computer (PC) assembly agents (or "agents" for short) compete for customer
orders and for procurement of a variety of components. Each day, customers issue
requests for quotes and select from quotes submitted by the agents, based on delivery
dates and prices. The agents are limited by the capacity of their assembly lines and have
to procure components from a set of eight suppliers. Four types of components are
required to build a PC: CPUs, Motherboards, Memory, and Disk drives.
Each component type is available in multiple versions (e.g. different CPUs, different
motherboards,
etc.). Customer demand comes in the form of requests for quotes for different types of
PCs, each requiring a different combination of scarce components.
A game begins when one or more agents connect to a game server. The server simulates
the suppliers and customers, and provides banking, production, and warehousing services
to the individual agents. The game continues for a fixed number of simulated days. At the
end of a game, the agent with the highest sum of money in the bank is declared the
winner.
Figure 10. In TAC SCM an agents task is to manufacture PC’s, win customer
orders, and procure components.
There seem possibilities to combine such agents with our work on negotiation, which
might make this MKT2 project interesting for many people in the group.
Although the scenario calls for a single agent for each team, there are several sub-tasks
for each agent that could well be performed by different agents working as a team:
negotiate supply contracts, bid for customer orders, manage daily assembly activities and
ship completed orders to customers [tac06].
TAC Classic
In TAC Classic, each "agent" (an entrant to the competition) is a travel agent, with the
goal of assembling travel packages. Each agent is acting on behalf of eight clients, who
express their preferences for various aspects of the trip. The objective of the travel agent
is to maximize the total satisfaction of its clients (the sum of the client utilities). TAC
version 4 runs on Java 2 SE 1.4. I have not seen any neat real-time visualization, it all
boils down to spreadsheets and statistics.
Figure 11. Illustration of the environment a TAC agent operates within. To the left
are its eight clients and their preferences, in the middle all its competitors lined up
(7 competitors/game), and to its right are all the auctions (28 simultaneous auctions
of three different types).
God Sims, Manager Sims
God sims are sims where you – the player – determine a goal and the inhabitants of your
world then act to reach these goals. I think they are called "god sims" because no
inhabitant will directly dispute the choice of your goals, though they may indirectly do so
by going to strike or moving away. Less frequently the term "manager sim" is also used
for these simulators.
I see possibilities in this type of sims to combine the ideas of TAC with nice graphics and
real-time gameplay. However, it appears difficult to find a sim actually realizing these
possibilities. To show this I discuss a number of them and whether they might be
modified to come closer to my idea.
Civilization
Figure 12. Snapshot from Civilization.
In Civilization, you match wits against the greatest leaders of all time in a quest to build
the ultimate empire. Before starting a game, players must make a lot of decisions that will
affect how the entire game is played. These options vary from choosing different types of
world conditions to deciding which Civilization they will play as. Each of the ages, from
Ancient to Future, has its own set of different technologies to research, and what you
choose to research will make your civilization unique, and it will change your chances for
survival. If players didn't get a chance to research something they might be able to barter
for it from neighboring civilizations.
Civilization as computer game is a single-person game but you play against computer
controlled opponents. Hence, the simulator itself seems multi-player.
There is a free open source version of Civilization available [FreeCiv09].
Fighting occasionally happens in Civilization, but it might be a reason to drop it.
Figure 13. Snapshot from the free civilization game
SimCity
Figure 14. Snapshot from SimCity
The objective of SimCity, as the name of the game suggests, is to build and design a city,
without specific goals to achieve. The player can mark land as being zoned as
commercial, industrial, or residential, add buildings, change the tax rate, build a power
grid, build transportation systems and many other actions, in order to enhance the city.
The player may face disasters including: flooding, tornadoes, fires (often from air
disasters or even shipwrecks), earthquakes and attacks by monsters. In addition, monsters
and tornadoes can trigger train crashes by running into passing trains. Later disasters in
the game's sequels included lightning strikes, volcanoes, meteors and attack by
extraterrestrial craft.
On January 10, 2008 the SimCity source code was released under the free software GPL
3 license under the name Micropolis [Micropolis08]. Lincity [Lincity04] is another very
similar software package that is also free but seems to have even slightly better graphics.
In Civilization you do not play against computer opponents. But it may be possible to
modify the code to allow multi player games. SimCity competitions have been organized
(for 7th graders in middle school) with SimCity [Wells03] but these were based only on
the final population size, players did not interact directly in the game.
RailRoad Tycoon
The objective of the game is to build and manage a railroad company by laying track,
building stations, and buying and scheduling trains. You also must build the railroad in a
certain amount of time to win the game. The game also has other railroad companies
attempting to put the player out of business with stock dealings and "Rate Wars". If this
had been coupled to scarce production of railroad tracks and coal, this could set for some
interesting negotiations between the players.
Figure 15. Railroad Tycoon II, for PC.
There
are
quite
some
similar
simulators
(check
for
instance
http://www.railserve.com/Computers/), e.g. "1830: Railroads & Robber Barons" based on
Avalon Hill's board game of the same name, A-Train (available for free now), Crayon
Rail Fanatics (Shareware) etc. It is very likely that an open source railroad tycoon
simulator is available somewhere.
Settlers
Figure 16. Settlers: Rise of the Empire on PC
Unlike other "God-sims", The Settlers is a much gentler game. There's none of the fire
and mythology of Populous, or the cut'n'dried world of SimCity. The Settlers is almost
rural in it's approach, very laid back and therefore quiet [sic] relaxing to play. The calm
way in which your worker saunter around the playscreen, chopping trees, fishing in the
rivers or feeding the pigs (with the absolutely delightful oinks eminating from the
speakers), it's an undemanding but treacherously addictive game.
As with SimCity, you have no direct control but you select targets (such as animals to be
hunted or structures to be built) and settlers themselves following natural instincts and
cues. Put down a woodcutter shop in town, then click on a forest, and people will
naturally start chopping down trees and taking them to the woodcutter to create lumber.
As with SimCity, this is not a multi-player game but it might be possible to turn it into
one.
Settlers 2 has a multiplayer mode, where you can compete against other players via the
internet.
An open source version of Settlers called Widelands is available at [Widelands09]. It may
be possible to modify this to our exact needs.
Figure 17. Widelands.
Air Traffic controller
Although a bit different than the other manager sims, in the air traffic controller sim you
also control "puppets" (in this case, planes) by giving them targets to meet.
Figure 18. ATCsimulator2
In ATCsimulator2 [ATCSimulator2], your goal is to allow for the "safe and expeditious"
flow of air traffic. Your main tools are the radio contact with the planes and the radar
screen. It is your job to assist the pilots arriving at airports inside your airspace
boundaries by lining them up for an approach (preparing for a landing). It is also your job
to assist pilots departing your airspace by handing them over to the Air Route Traffic
Control Center (ARTCC) controller at the appropriate time or fix location.
Air Traffic Controller 3 [ATC3] goes further than this, also including taxiing procedures
and maps of the airport itself.
Figure 19. Snapshot from ATC3.
There is an online ATC simulator at http://www.atc-sim.com. It might be interesting to
hook GOAL agents onto that (but we have to check whether that would be acceptable for
them). However this simulator looks way less attractive than the sims above.
Figure 20. Snapshot from ATC-SIM.
There is an open-source ATC project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/airtraffic/.
However this project seems dead. Another open source project is at
http://www.planetsourcecode.com/URLSEO/vb/scripts/ShowCode!asp/txtCodeId!66211/
lngWId!-10/anyname.htm.
All ATCs score low on competition, as there is usually only one ATC per airfield. This
might change if multiple airfields get into the equation and planes can choose between
airports. However I am not aware of such ATC simulators.
Wrap-Up
Table 1 shows a summary of our conclusions. The team sports like hockey and football
fit the requirements nicely. For soccer, there exist a number of software packages that
allow switching between real robots and the virtual players. Maybe a drawback is that
these sports allow only two teams playing against each other. That requires a tournament
and more complex scoring to determine the "winner". Another drawback is that the
existing visualization modules lack the "wow factor" of modern games, even though
some of them have 3D rendering engines. The player agents in the game have only a
small degree of specialization: defend or attack.
Robocup Rescue improves a bit on the renderings. The graphics look more appealing,
though they are not state of the art. There is much more differentiation between the
agents as there are at least three groups of agents: firemen, policemen and ambulance
personel. However the competition aspect here is weak.
TAC offers very nice competition aspects, offers easy integration with GOAL and also it
offers interesting possibilities to couple to our negotiation project. Unfortunately its
graphics are very dull, mainly graphs and numbers, and maybe there is not even a realtime visualization.
Table 1. Comparison of discussed applications along a few dimensions. Competition
gets a + if there is direct competition between teams, if there is need to cooperate
between teams, and if there is an international competition..
ease
of agent
integration
differences
with GOAL
Java +
-
Fleeble
Soccer
RoboCup soccer
space hockey
robocup rescue:
VRS
robocup rescue:
rescue agents
Multi
Agent
Contest
TAC SCM
TAC Classic
God/Manager
Sims
ATC
ATC3
graphics
wowfactor
-
competition
+
use real Link
robots
with
nego.
-
?
-
+
+
++
+
+
+
+
-
±
+
-
-
-?
-
+
-
-
++
-
-
+
+
-
+
?
-
--++
+++
+++
-
-
+
+
-
---
+
+
++
-
-
-
Some of the God/Manager sims score very high on the wow factor. Unfortunately they all
will need modification to turn them into a real multi-agent competition platform. More
modification seems necessary to allow agents to work as citizens in teams, to enable
differentiation of their tasks. Additionally I am not aware of any Java based god-sim so
we will require (1) platform-dependent code (2) use of JNI to couple them to Java. I still
see the potential here and I may have missed that perfect variant, but as it is now this
requires just too much modifications to get what we would like.
The ATC category shows wide variation. Some look fantastic, some look poor. In most,
the agent differentiation probably will be poor, as all traffic control agents basically
would have the same job. But ATC3 covers much more of air traffic control and might
give challenging opportunities for a multi-agent setup.
Verdict
If we ignore the possibility to link with real robots, TAC SCM appears to be the winner,
even if we cross out one + against a - for its very low wow factor. If we consider its
potential for coupling with the negotiation project, this one seems very attractive indeed.
It would have been perfect if we would have found a God sim that combines TAC SCM
with some nice graphics and some real-time game play. Unfortunately we did not find
existing software close enough to our needs.
Rococup Rescue comes on a good second place, and offers potential to couple to robots
for an additional student motivation.
References
[ATCSimulator2] ATC simulator 2: Legacy Simulations from aerostudios 2(2009).
http://www.atcsimulator.com.
[ATC3] I am an Air Traffic Controller3 (2008). http://www.atc3support.com.
[ATC-SIM] ATC-Sim video tutorial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IzzPS1jZuU.
[Balaguer08] B. Balaguer, S. Balakirsky, S. Carpin, M. Lewis, C. Scrapper. "USARSim:
a validated simulator for research in robotics and automation". Workshop on "Robot
simulators: available software, scientific applications and future trends", at IEEE/RSJ
IROS 2008. https://robotics.ucmerced.edu/Robotics/publications.
[Carpin07] Carpin, S., Lewis, M., Wang, J., Balakirsky, S., & Scrapper, C. (2007).
USARSim: a robot simulator for research and education. Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2007, Roma, Italy), p.1400-1405 .
http://user.it.uu.se/~annikak/lewis-usarsim.pdf.
[Dastani07] Dastani, M., Dix, J., & Novák, P. (2007). Agent Contest Competition: 3rd
Edition. http://www.springerlink.com/content/?k=multi-agent+contest
[Dastani09] Multi Agent Contest. http://www.multiagentcontest.org.
[eSemble09] XVR (2009). http://www.esemble.com/xvr/index.php?ID=435&t=uk&s=432
[FIFA09] EA Sports: Let's FIFA09. http://fifa09.ea.com/us/screenshots.
[FreeCiv09] FreeCiv: cause civilization should be free!
http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page.
[Gazebo06] Gazebo: 3D multiple robots simulator with dynamics.
http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/index.php?src=gazebo.
[Ismith06] Ismith (2006). An MMO Built Around Healing?
http://kotaku.com/gaming/mmorpg/an-mmo-built-around-healing-158258.phpAn.
[Kaminka02] Kaminka, G. A. et al. (2002). Game Bots: a Flexible test bed for multiagent
team research. Communications Of The ACM January 2002/Vol. 45, No. 1.
http://usl.sis.pitt.edu/ulab/pubs/ p43-kaminka.html.
[Koster06] The Healing Game. On Raph Koster's Website, March 2nd.
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/02/the-healing-game/
[LinCity04] Lincity - A City Simulation Game (2004). http://lincity.sourceforge.net.
[Micropolis08] Micropolis (video game).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_(software).
[MobileSim09] Mobile Robots: MobileSim.
http://robots.mobilerobots.com/wiki/MobileSim
[NTT09] Research: RoboCup Soccer Simulation.
http://www.ntt.dis.titech.ac.jp/web/jResearch.html
[RobocupRescue07] Rescue Virtual Robot Simulation (2007).
http://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/robocup/index.php/Rescue_Virtual_Robot_Simulation
[RescueAgents09] Robocup: Rescue Agents.
http://www.robocuprescue.org/wiki/index.php?title=Rescue_Agents
[Stage06] Stage: 2D multiple-robot simulator.
http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/index.php?src=stage.
[tac06] Collins, J. et al. (2006). The supply Chain Management Game for the 2007
Trading Agent Competition. Carnegie Mellon University, PA.
http://www.sics.se/tac/tac07scmspec.pdf.
[TAC09] Welcome to the trading agent competition. Competitive Benchmarking for The
Trading Agent Community. http://www.sics.se/tac/page.php?id=1.
[UniBall09] UniBall HQ. http://www.uniballhq.com.
[USCRobotics09] USC Robotics Research Lab. Player, Stage and Gazebo. http://wwwrobotics.usc.edu/?l=Projects:PlayerStageGazebo
[Wells03] Wells, A. J. (2003). SimCity Competition. Bellefonte Area School District.
http://www.basd.net/staff/awells/SimCity%20Instructions.htm.
[Wang05] Wang, J. (2005). USARSim: A Game-based Simulation of the NIST Reference
Arenas. http://usl.sis.pitt.edu/wjj/USAR/Release/USARsim-manual.pdf
[Widelands09] Widelands. http://wl.widelands.org/wiki/DevelopersPage
[Zaratti06] Zaratti, M. (2006). Karma Mass Test. http://usarsim.sourceforge.net/ and
select documents.