[Push] evolved quidditch players

[Lee Spector]

Push listers,

Some of you may be interested the following article:

http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/spew4th.pl? 
ascribeid=20040504.114704&time=12%2033%20PDT&year=2004&public=1

This describes Raphael Crawford-Marks's recent work using GP to evolve  
teams that play quidditch, the game from the Harry Potter books. Some  
of you may remember that I presented a late-breaking paper on "Virtual  
Quidditch: A Challenge Problem for Automatically Programmed Software  
Agents" at GECCO-2001 -- what Raphael has done for his undergraduate  
thesis is to respond (quite well, in my opinion) to this challenge.

Raphael plans to make both his thesis and the quidditch simulator --  
which was also designed to permit others to  
evolve/train/hand-code/whatever teams of their own, using their own  
methods -- available on the web shortly. We'll post a URL when that  
happens.

FYI Raphael's quidditch simulator is implemented in the BREVE  
simulation environment, which can be obtained from  
http://www.spiderland.org/breve. The programs for his quidditch teams  
are expressed in the Push programming language, about which you can  
learn more from http://hampshire.edu/lspector/push.html. And the  
GECCO-2001 "challenge problem" paper can be obtained from:  
http://helios.hampshire.edu/lspector/pubs/quidditch-cite.pdf.

  -Lee

--
Lee Spector
Dean, Cognitive Science + Associate Professor, Computer Science
Cognitive Science, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002
lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438