Rebecca Broadway, Tanner Lindbloom
Alan Perrow, Bao Hong, Benjamin Le Heup, Jace Mixon, Michael Laager
Everglades is a strategy game developed by Lockheed Martin and presented to us by our sponsors Rebecca Broadway and Tanner Lindbloom. The game consists of two opposing teams fighting to attain and retain control over various capture points on the map, awarding their team with points, with the premise that whichever team has more points at the end of the game, wins. Each control point is considered a node on the map and is directly connected to other nearby nodes, facilitating a method of transportation between them.
Alan Perrow, Bao Hong, Benjamin Le Heup, Jace Mixon, and Michael Laager, the five members of our team, have been assigned to work on the project presented by our sponsors, representing ourselves as Team Gold. We are one of two teams assigned to this task, with the other being Team Black. Both teams have been tasked with the same project, focusing on implementing artificial intelligence into the game via reinforcement learning battle bots. The two-team dynamic is used as a means to observe differences in solutions, alternative methods of arriving at those solutions, and the challenges and restrictions discovered along the way pertaining to this project.
The project itself entails the creation of four separate agents that are developed to play within the Everglades game environment. This will be done by using creative, innovative, and potentially state-of-the-art policy gradient methods in order to train the agents into achieving the highest win rates as is feasibly possible. The creation and training of these agents will be done with OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for reinforcement learning that provides a working environment to be used by the game and our developed agents.
In order to successfully complete this project, each member of our team must conduct research on various topics related to artificial intelligence in order to obtain a fundamental skill set. This includes but is not limited to information on machine learning and reinforcement learning, OpenAI Gym, and Everglades itself. Working as a collaborative whole, our team, Team Gold, will be undertaking this task and all it entails with the goal of fully completing the development of four agents.