The next Angry Birds AI competition will be held at IJCAI 2017 in Melbourne, Australia, August 24-25, 2017. For more details please refer to the Call for Participation and the detailed Competition Rules. This year we will again have two competition tracks, the standard track and a competitive track where two AI agents try to solve the same level with alternating shots. Previous Angry Birds AI competitions were held in Sydney in December 2012 during the Australasian AI conference, in Beijing in August 2013 during the IJCAI conference, in Prague in August 2014 at the ECAI conference, in Buenos Aires in July 2015 at the IJCAI conference, and most recently at the IJCAI 2016 conference in New York. Further details about these past competitions can be found here.

The aim of the Angry Birds AI competition (AIBIRDS) is to build intelligent agents that can play new Angry Birds levels better than the best human players. This is surprisingly difficult for AI as it requires similar capabilities to what intelligent systems need for successfully interacting with the physical world, one of the grand challenges of AI. As such the competition offers a simplified and controlled environment for developing and testing the necessary AI technologies, a seamless integration of computer vision, machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, reasoning under uncertainty, planning, and heuristic search, among others. Over the past three years there have been significant improvements, but we are still a long way from reaching the ultimate aim and, thus, there are great opportunities for participants in this competition.