SIFT Repeats Clean Sweep of Novelty Track at AI Birds IJCAI

Brag: SIFT repeats its clean sweep of the Novelty Track in the AI Birds competition. Congratulations to David Musliner, Mike Pelican, Steven Johnston, Matt McLure, Christopher Tran and Helen Wauck.

Background: Each year at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) there is a competition for the best automated agent playing some version of Angry Birds. They have added a Novelty Track that allows unexpected events and properties in the game. Companies and universities submit agents to: 1) detect and 2) solve the game in the presence of novelties. The solutions are run for the novelty scenarios and the base scenarios to see if improved novelty performance detracts from base game performance.