The 2017 AIBIRDS Level Generation Competition

Matthew Stephenson, Jochen Renz, Xiaoyu Ge, Lucas Ferreira, Julian Togelius, Peng Zhang

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the second AIBIRDS level generation competition, held jointly at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games and the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This competition tasked entrants with developing a level generator for the physics-based puzzle game Angry Birds. Submitted generators were required to deal with many physical reasoning constraints caused by the realistic nature of the game's environment, in addition to ensuring that the created levels were fun, challenging, and solvable. This year's competition was a significant improvement over the previous year, with a greater number of participants and more advanced generators. In this paper, we describe the framework, rules, submitted generators, and results for this competition. We also provide some background information on related research and other video game AI competitions and discuss what can be learned from this year's competition. There are several game and real-world applications for this type of research, and we provide some examples of the types of levels we would like future competition entries to generate.