Multi-agent learning with Pommerman

Together with James and Henry, I’m going to try to build two bots and enter them in the team Bomberman competition, which takes place at the beginning of December.

In a test of multi-agent learning, the two bots will face off against other bots, who they’ll try to blow up with bombs while avoiding being blown up themselves.

Our plan is:

  1. Get the basic Pommerman environment running on our laptops.
  2. Understand how the game and example agents work.
  3. Set up a way to run lots of iterations of competitions between various agents.
  4. Improve the example agents with more advanced heuristics-based play.
  5. Try out some techniques from the multi-agent learning literature, and see if we can systematically beat our heuristics-based agents.
  6. ???
  7. Submit our best team of two agents, and compete against other teams live at NIPS 2018.

Progress so far: environment installed. Example agents running. Next up: understand how they work.

Will we manage to build any agents that beat the example agents? Will our agents perform as expected on match day, or crash and freeze in live play? Will we win enough games to make it on to the leaderboard and win one of the prizes? To be continued…

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