2009 Simulate Car Racing Championship

The 2009 Simulated Car Racing
Championship
Daniele Loiacono, Julian Togelius, and Pier Luca Lanzi

Simulated Car Racing Championship @ CIG-2009

2009 Simulate Car Racing Championship

 The goal is to submit a learned or developed controller for
TORCS, an open source racing simulator, that is able to drive
fast alone and in presence of opponents
 Championship involves 9 races and will be run during 3
Conferences
IEEE CEC-2009, Trondheim (Norway), May 18th – May
21st
ACM GECCO-2009, Montreal (Canada), July 8th – 12th
IEEE CIG-2009, Milan (Italy), September 7th – 11th
 Winners awarded on the basis of their scoring in each
conference competition.
 At the end, the team with highest overall score will be the
winner the championship


Motivations


Motivations

 Simulated Car Racing is a funny and exciting competition
 It is possible to see and play with the entries of this
competition
 It looks really attractive to students and people outside the
field


Goals of Simulated Car Racing

 Proposing a challenging competition:
not designed with Computational Intelligence in mind
computationally expensive
noisy and “not completely” deterministic
more similar to a real-world problem

 Proposing a relevant game-based competition:
more representative of commercial games AI
real-time
dealing with a lot of practical issues
a lot of programmed AI available for comparison
human players can interact with AI


The Open Racing Car Simulator

 TORCS is a state of the art open source simulator written in C++

 Main features
Sophisticated dynamics
Provided with several
cars, tracks, and
controllers
Active community of
users and developers
Easy to develop your
own controller

 OS Support
Linux: binaries and building from sources
Windows: binaries and “limited” bulding from sources support
OSX: legacy binaries and no building from sources support 


Competition API

 To make TORCS more easy to use we
developed an API based on socket (UDP)
 Values of sensors and effectors are sent TORCS
through UDP Patch
 3 components
Torcs Patch Server BOT
Server Bot (C++)
Client API (C++ and Java)
UDP

Client
Controlller


Sensors

 Rangefinders for…
…edges of the track
…opponents
 Speed, RPM, fuel, damage, angle with track, distance race,
position on track, etc.


Effectors

 Basically 4 effectors
Steering wheel [-1,+1]
Gas pedal [0, +1]
Brake pedal [0,+1]
Gearbox {-1,0,1,2,3,4,5,6}


Entries submitted

 CEC-2009
Luigi Cardamone, Politecnico di Milano (champ CIG-2008)
Diego Pérez & Yago Sáez, University Carlos III, Madrid
Jan Quadflieg, TU Dortmund
Thies Lönneker & Martin V. Butz, University of Würzburg
Enrique Onieva & David A. Pelta., Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Cientificas & Universidad de Granada
Chung Cheng Chiu, Academia Sinica
 GECCO-2009
Jorge Muñoz, University Carlos III, Madrid
Bernardi, Ciambelli, Fiocchetti, Manfucci and Pizzo, University of
Perugia
Wong Ka Chun, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Witold Szymaniak, Poznan University of Technology
 CIG-2009
Marc Ebner and Thorsten Tiede, Eberhard Karls Universität,
Tübingen
Wolf-Dieter Beelitz, BHR Engineering Ltd., Pforzheim


Types of entries

 Mainly evolved/Learned
Luigi Cardamone, Politecnico di Milano (champ CIG-2008)
Bernardi, Ciambelli, Fiocchetti, Manfucci and Pizzo, University of Perugia
Witold Szymaniak, Poznan University of Technology
Marc Ebner and Thorsten Tiede, Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen
 Programmed behaviors developed with a significant CI contribute
Thies Lönneker & Martin V. Butz, University of Würzburg
Jan Quadflieg, TU Dortmund
Diego Pérez & Yago Sáez, University Carlos III, Madrid
 Mainly programmed
Enrique Onieva & David A. Pelta., Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientificas & Universidad de Granada
Wolf-Dieter Beelitz, BHR Engineering Ltd., Pforzheim
Chung Cheng Chiu, Academia Sinica
Jorge Muñoz, University Carlos III, Madrid
C. Guse and D. Vrajitorum, Indiana University South Ben
Wong Ka Chun, The Chinese University of Hong Kong


Championship standings

Competitor CEC-2009 GECCO-2009 CIG-2009 Total
Onieva&Pelta 22 32 ? 54
COBOSTAR 28.5 16.5 ? 45
Luigi (Champ2008) 20 23 ? 43
Perez&Saez 16 11 ? 27
Mr. Racer 19 0 ? 19
Redjava 14 0 ? 14
Epic 0 13 ? 13
Simplicity 0 12.5 ? 12.5
DRT 0 11 ? 11
Jorge Muñoz 0 8.5 ? 8.5
Witold 0 0 ? 0


Scoring process: first stage

 Scoring process involves three tracks (unknown to the
competitors):
Buzzard-Raceway
Forza
Migrants
 Only a controller at once is tested and performance is
defined as the distance covered within 10000 game tics


First Stage: Buzzard-Raceway

DRT
Witek Witold
Epic
Perez&Saez
Ebner&Tiede
Simplicity
Luigi (Champ2008)
Wolf-Dieter
Redjava
Jorge Fuentes
COBOSTAR
Onieva&Pelta
Mr. Racer

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000


First Stage: Forza

DRT
Witek Witold
Epic
Perez&Saez
Ebner&Tiede
Simplicity
Luigi (Champ2008)
Wolf-Dieter
Redjava
Jorge Fuentes
COBOSTAR
Onieva&Pelta
Mr. Racer

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000


First Stage: Migrants

DRT
Witek Witold
Epic
Perez&Saez
Ebner&Tiede
Simplicity
Luigi (Champ2008)
Wolf-Dieter
Redjava
Jorge Fuentes
COBOSTAR
Onieva&Pelta
Mr. Racer

0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000


First stage: summary

Rank Competitor Forza Buzzard Migrants Total
1 COBOSTAR 6 10 10 26
2 Onieva&Pelta 8 8 8 24
3 Jorge Muñoz 5 5 6 16
4 Mr. Racer 10 4 0 14
5 Wolf-Dieter 3 6 5 14
6 Redjava 4 2 4 10
7 Luigi (Champ2008) 2 3 2 7
8 Perez&Saez 0 0 3 3
9 Ebner&Tiede 0 1 1 2
10 Simplicity 1 0 0 1
11 Witek Witold 0 0 0 0
 COBOSTAR and Onieve&Pelta
Clearly the fastest controllers…
… but also the most reliable
 In each track the performances of best controllers are very close
 COBOSTAR outperfoms Berniw (one of the best programmed
controller provided with TORCS) on two tracks


Diego Pérez et al.

University Carlos III, Madrid

8th

CIG-2008 Champ

Luigi Cardamone
Politecnico di Milano

7th

Redjava

Chung Cheng Chiu
Academia Sinica, Taipei

6th

Wolf-Dieter Beelitz, BHR
Engineering Ltd., Pforzheim

5th

Mr Racer

Jan Quadflieg
4 th TU Dortmund

Jorge Muñoz

University Carlos III, Madrid

3rd

Enrique Onieva
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientificas, La Poveda-Arganda del Rey, Madrid

David A. Pelta
Universidad de Granada
2nd

COBOSTAR

Thies Lönneker and Martin V. Butz
University of Würzburg

1st
http://www.coboslab.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de


The final stage

 Who is the best controller in presence of opponents?
 In the final stage we compared all the entries with the
previous CIG-2008 champion
 For each track we run 5 races with random starting grids
 The final score is computed as the median of the 5 races
using the F1 point system (10 to first, 8 to second, 6 to third
5, 4, 3 to the last)
 In addition two 2-points bonus are awarded to
The controller that reported less damages at the end of
the race
The controller that achieved the fastest lap of the race


The Final Stage: Buzzard-Raceway

Competitor Buzzard Forza Migrant Total
COBOSTAR 11 11
Onieva&Pelta 9 9
Jorge Muñoz 6 6
Luigi (Champ 2008) 4.5 4.5
Wolf-Dieter 4 4
Mr. Racer 3.5 3.5
Perez & Saez 3 3
Redjava 2.5 2.5


The Final Stage: Forza

Onieva&Pelta 9 12 21
COBOSTAR 11 7 18
Jorge Muñoz 6 3.5 9.5
Mr. Racer 3.5 6 9.5
Wolf-Dieter 4 5.5 9.5
Luigi (champ 2008) 4.5 4 8.5
Redjava 2.5 4 6.5
Perez & Saez 3 2.5 5.5


The Final Stage: Migrants

COBOSTAR 11 7 12 30
Onieva&Pelta 9 12 8 29
Wolf-Dieter 4 5.5 6 15.5
Jorge Muñoz 6 3.5 5 14.5
Luigi (champ 2008) 4.5 4 4 12.5
Mr. Racer 3.5 6 2.5 12
Redjava 2.5 4 4 10.5
Perez & Saez 3 2.5 4 9.5

COBOSTAR is the winner of CIG-2009 Car Racing Competition!


Championship 2009

Competitor CEC-2009 GECCO-2009 CIG-2009 Total
Onieva&Pelta 22 32 29 83
COBOSTAR 28.5 16.5 30 75
Luigi (Champ2008) 20 23 12.5 55.5
Perez&Saez 16 11 9.5 36.5
Mr. Racer 19 0 12 31
Redjava 14 0 10.5 24.5
Jorge Muñoz 8.5 14.5 23
Wolf-Dieter 15.5 15.5
Epic 13 0 13
Simplicity 12.5 0 12.5
DRT 11 0 11
Witold 0 0 0
Ebner&Tiede 0 0

Onieva & Pelta winners of 2009 Simulated Car Racing Championship!


Conclusions (1)

 Really a lot of improvement from the first edition of TORCS-
based competition at WCCI-2008 (June, 2008)

WCCI-2008 CIG-2009


Conclusions (2)

 Pool of competitors is getting bigger and competition is
getting more and more difficult
 The best controllers are at the same fast and very reliable:
they are able to win even from the last position of the
starting grid
 Many controllers improved their opponent
avoidance/overtaking behavior
 The best controllers among the submitted ones are
competitive with the programmed controllers in the game!


What about CI?

 Learn or evolve a controller from scratch does not seem to
lead to the best performance
 The winner is actually mainly programmed
 However most of the controllers involves CI:
Parameters optimization
Learning target speed/trajectory
Learning complex behaviors (?)


What next?

 We plan to organize again this competition next year keeping
the championship formula
 We are definitely interested in performances but we also
wish to see novel approaches and CI-relevant works:
Introducing a training stage to encourage learning
Improving sensory inputs to be competitive with
“professional” TORCS controller
Evaluating controllers also on specific tasks (e.g., race
start, overtaking, etc.) as a part of the competition
 Simulated Car Racing requires a big effort… how to keep
people interested?
Awards and prizes at major conferences
Dissemination of results


Thank You! Any Question?

2009 Simulate Car Racing Championship

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