EXCALIBUR
Adaptive Constraint-Based Agents in Artificial Environments

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"The German National Research Center for Information Technology in Berlin is working on a prototype to demonstrate its vision of a futuristic computer game ... These qualities will transform games of mindless violence into exercises on strategy."
The Sunday Times

Our goal is to develop a generic architecture for autonomously operating agents, like computer-guided characters/mobiles/items, within a complex computer-game environment. These agents must be able to find the right actions to pursue their given goals and adapt their behavior to new environments or opponents. But not only the actions of the individual agent have to be intelligent, agents should also be able to communicate and perform coordinated group actions.

The computer-games domain features the following properties:

  • Real Time:
    There is only little time for reasoning.
  • Dynamics:
    Computer games provide a highly dynamic world.
  • Resources:
    The world's resources may be restricted.
  • Incomplete Knowledge:
    An agent has only limited knowledge about the world.

Given these properties, the main research topics of the project are:

  • Planning:
    How can we model and represent actions, states, goals, etc.?
  • Search:
    How can we efficiently search for a plan that attains the agent's goals?
  • Multi-Agent Systems:
    How can agents cooperate/coordinate/communicate?
  • Learning:
    How can agents learn about their environment and develop new skills?

An overview can be found in the [Preface] of the [Documentation] section.


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Last update:
May 20, 2001 by Alexander Nareyek