The deadline for submitting the "intent to participate" form for the ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition has been extended to May 1st. If you are considering entering the competition, please go to http://tac.eecs.umich.edu/intent.html and complete the form. The original CFP is appended below. We encourage all interested parties to visit the competition web site (http://tac.eecs.umich.edu/) for a precise statement of the game rules and to see practice games in action. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition 8 July 2000 Boston, Massachusetts, USA --------------------------------------------------------------------- Trading in electronic markets is increasingly becoming both a commonplace economic activity and a topic of special interest within the AI, Electronic Commerce, and Multiagent Systems (MAS) research communities. Inspired by the success of competitions in various other AI realms, we announce the ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition, to be held in conjunction with a special purpose workshop at the Fourth International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-00), in Boston in July 2000. This event is designed to spur research on common problems, promote definitions of benchmarks and standard problem descriptions, and showcase current technologies. The competition will pit software agents--developed by research groups, students, and others from all over the world--against each other in a challenging market game. The software agents will represent travel coordinators whose goal is to arrange travel packages for clients. These travel packages consist of flights, hotel rooms, and tickets to entertainment events, all of which the agents buy (and, in the case of event tickets, sell) in electronic auctions. The market game has been specially designed to present agents with difficult decision problems and admit a wide variety of potential bidding strategies. The competition will be hosted on a version of the Michigan Internet AuctionBot that has been outfitted with features to facilitate and control distributed market games. Software agents communicate with the AuctionBot via a TCP-based agent programming interface. Simple example agents are available in a variety of platforms and programming languages. The final round of the competition will be held at the ICMAS-00 TAC workshop on 8 July 2000. Preliminary rounds may be necessary. We anticipate the following schedule for contest related events: 1 May 2000 Entrants registration (intent to participate) due. 17 June 2000 Preliminary rounds begin, if necessary. 7 July 2000 TAC contest and workshop, Boston MA. More information can be found at http://tac.eecs.umich.edu/ We encourage you to circulate this announcement to anyone who may be interested in participating. Questions may be directed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- -- Pete -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Peter Wurman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/wurman/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
