THE TILEWORLD SYSTEM

The Tileworld is an abstract testbed system designed to support experimentation with agent architectures in dynamic and unpredictable environments. The system includes a simulated environment, an embedded agent, and a set of routines to facilitate experimentation. The environment is a two-dimensional grid on which are located different kinds of objects, notably tiles, holes, obstacles and a ``gas station.'' Exogenous events can occur in the TileWorld: specifically, objects can appear and disappear during a simulation. The experimenter can control of variety of characteristics associated with the objects in the environment, such as the average rate at which they appear or disappear.

  • The Tileworld System : NOTE: This is fairly old and unsupported. The file you'll download is tar'd and uuencoded.

  • The Tileworld User's Guide (also included with the system).

  • A paper that talks about generalizing some of the ideas behind Tileworld to multi-agent settings: Deriving Multi-Agent Coordination through Filtering Strategies ,E. Ephrati, M. E. Pollack, and S. Ur, Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence , August 1995.

  • A paper reporting the results of some Tileworld experiments: Experimental Investigation of an Agent Commitment Strategy , M. E. Pollack, D. Joslin, A. Nunes, S. Ur, & E. Ephrati, Univ. of Pittsburgh Tech. Report Dept. of Computer Science 94-31, June 1994.

  • The original Tileworld paper: Introducing the Tileworld: Experimentally Evaluating Agent Architectures, M. E. Pollack and M. Ringuette, AAAI-90 , Boston, 1990. Hardcopy available from the author (pollack@cs.pitt.edu).

  • A paper that discusses the methodological issues involved in using testbeds like the Tileworld: Benchmarks, Testbeds, Controlled Experimentation, and the Design of Agent Architectures , S. Hanks, M. E. Pollack, and P. Cohen, AI Magazine , 14(4):17-42, 1993.