Optimising humanness: Designing the best human-like bot for unreal tournament 2004

Abstract

This paper presents multiple hybridizations of the two best bots on the BotPrize 2014 competition, which sought for the best human-like bot playing the First Person Shooter game Unreal Tournament 2004. To this aim the participants were evaluated using a Turing test in the game. The work considers MirrorBot (the winner) and NizorBot (the second) codes and combines them in two different approaches, aiming to obtain a bot able to show the best behaviour overall. There is also an evolutionary version on MirrorBot, which has been optimized by means of a Genetic Algorithm. The new and the original bots have been tested in a new, open, and public Turing test whose results show that the evolutionary version of MirrorBot apparently improves the original bot, and also that one of the novel approaches gets a good humanness level.