Dear participants,

there is a new release of the MASSim-package.

You can download it from the following location and we strongly encourage you to do so:

Download massim-2010-07-29.tar.bz2

File Title: massim-2010-07-29.tar.bz2 (Details) File Type: bz2 File Version: File Size: 6,673.69 Kb License:

We have fixed a couple of bugs. Fortunately these bugs had nothing to do with your user-experience, so we expect that you will not know the difference.

Most importantly we have come up with a couple of *new maps*.

If you go to the scripts-directory and execute the shell-script "startServer.sh" you can now choose the map to play. Note that only the maps prefixed with "2010" are relevant. You will notice that there are a couple of new maps listed, when executing the script.

Now comes the crucial point. We would like to encourage every participating team to try out these new maps and give us a feedback. We would like to know how you estimate the difficulty of each map for your agents. Based on your feedback we will design the final maps for the tournament. Note that if you provide no feedback, the final maps
might either be too hard or too easy.

Please send your feedback directly to the mailing-list. The deadline is *21. August*.

As a reminder: the registration is open until *9. August*.

Cheers,
Tristan, Michael, Jomi and Jürgen

Dear participants,

the registration for the multi-agent programming contest is now open!

Please download the registration template and follow the instructions therein.

Download Participation Registration Template

File Title: Participation Registration Template (Details) File Type: tex File Version: 2010 File Size: 3.59 Kb License:

The preparations for the next Multi-Agent Programming Contest 2010 are almost completed. If you are interested please state your intent to participate by subscribing to the mailing list now. Below you can find the important dates:

This competition is an attempt to stimulate research in the area of multi-agent system development and programming by

1. identifying key problems,
2. collecting suitable benchmarks, and
3. gathering test cases which require and enforce coordinated action

The performance of a particular system will be determined in a series of games where the systems compete against each other. While winning the competition is not the main point, we hope it will shed light on the applicability of certain frameworks to particular domains.

The contest scenario consists of developing a multi-agent system to solve a cooperative task in a dynamic environment. The environment is a grid-like world in which virtual cows are moving around collectively in one or more herds exhibiting a swarm-like behavior. There are two corrals, each belongs to one of the two agent teams. The teams of agents compete to control the behavior of animals and lead them to their own corral. The winning agent team is the one that scores highest. A detailed scenario description of the scenario will be available in time.

We are happy to announce that the MASSim-software-package has been released! You can access it here:

Download massim-2010-07-29.tar.bz2

File Title: massim-2010-07-29.tar.bz2 (Details) File Type: bz2 File Version: File Size: 6,673.69 Kb License:

If you have any problems please contact us immediately. Although we tried hard on making the software package as bug-free as possible we cannot be absolutely sure and therefore would be grateful if you would report us any bugs.

Participants and all interested colleagues are invited to subscribe to the agentcontest2010 [at] in.tu-clausthal.de mailing list.

All the important details and announcements including scenario and communication protocol specifications as well as software release announcements and bug reports will be announced and discussed via this list.

To subscribe, send an empty e-mail to

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with the subject subscribe.

The confirmation request and welcome message will be sent to you shortly afterwards. Please follow the instructions in the automatic mailing list replies and do not delete the confirmation mail, you most likely want to use the confirmation id later.

The archive is semi-public. That means, it is accessible to list subscribers. The link is as follows:

https://mail.in.tu-clausthal.de/Lists/agentcontest2010/List.html?Language=english

In order to login, you need to provide your e-mail address with which you are subscribed to the list and the confirmation ID. You get the confirmation ID in the confirmation e-mail right after you subscribed.
In the case you do not have that e-mail any more, simply send an arbitrary e-mail to

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In return the system will send you confirmation ID which you can use to login.

• Tristan M. Behrens,Clausthal University of Technology,
• Jürgen Dix, Clausthal University of Technology,
• Jomi Hübner, Federal University of Santa Catarina,
• Michael Köster, Clausthal University of Technology.

• Mehdi Dastani, Utrecht University,
• Jürgen Dix, Clausthal University of Technology,
• Peter Novák, Czech Technical University.