Welcome to the Angry Birds AI Competition Website

NEW (April 6, 2023): The AIBIRDS 2023 Competition will be held as part of the IJCAI 2023 Conference in Macao, August 24-25, 2023
NEW (July 27, 2022): BamBirds from the University of Bamberg, Germany is the AIBIRDS 2022 Champion! Congratulations to Diedrich Wolter and Felix Haase!
NEW (July 27, 2022): OpenMind from SIFT is the AIBIRDS 2022 Novelty Champion! Congratulations to David Musliner and his team!
NEW (July 6, 2021): Get all past competition levels for training, testing and improving your agent.
NEW (March 8, 2020): At AIBIRDS 2021 we introduce the Novelty Track where AI agents need to deal with novel objects and capabilities, just like human players do in the real game.
NEW (November 5, 2019): We have updated the Chromium version you should use. Please download the new one in case your current one doesn't work anymore
NEW (July 9, 2019): AI meets Angry Birds published at Nature Machine Intelligence

Here you will find all the information about upcoming and previous Angry Birds AI Competitions. The task of this competition is to develop a computer program that can successfully play Angry Birds. The long term goal is to build an intelligent Angry Birds playing agent that can play new levels better than the best human players. This is a very difficult problem as it requires agents to predict the outcome of physical actions without having complete knowledge of the world, and then to select a good action out of infinitely many possible actions. This is an essential capability of future AI systems that interact with the physical world. The Angry Birds AI competition provides a simplified and controlled environment for developing and testing these capabilities. 

The next Angry Birds AI competition will be held as part of IJCAI-2023 in Macao, SAR, China, August 24-25, 2025. For more details please refer to the Call for Participation and the detailed Competition Results. For the third time this year we will run a Novelty Track as part of our competition where AI agents need to be able to deal with novel objects and capabilities, just like human players in the real game. Previous Angry Birds AI competitions were held in Sydney in December 2012 during the Australasian AI conference, in Beijing in August 2013 during the IJCAI conference, in Prague in August 2014 at the ECAI conference, in Buenos Aires in July 2015 at the IJCAI conference, in New York in July 2016 at the IJCAI 2016 conference, in Melbourne at the IJCAI 2017 conference, the IJCAI 2018 conference in Stockholm and most recently at IJCAI 2019 in Macau. The 2020 competition has been cancelled, as the host conference IJCAI 2020 has been postponed to 2021. The 2021 competition was held virtually as part of the IJCAI 2021 conference in Montreal, Canada. In 2022, the competition was again live at IJCAI-22 in Vienna, Austria. Further details about these past competitions can be found here. 

We provide a basic game playing software that includes a computer vision module, a trajectory planning module, and the game interface that works with the Chrome version of Angry Birds. The image you see above is a typical output of our computer vision module that detects and categorises the relevant objects and places a bounding box around them. Alternatively, you can download the source code of previous successful participants. This year for the first time we also offer a Science Birds version that will be used for the Novelty Track. You can use that version also to train your non-novelty agent, but obviously there will be small differences in the physics of the game. Compared to Angry Birds Chrome, Science Birds offers a large number of game levels for training, a game level generator, as well as a speed-up of the gameplay of up to 50 times, and is therefore particularly suited for Deep Learning-base agents. As part of the novelty track, we also offer a prize for the best agent able to deal with standard, non-novel Angry Birds games. So you can participate in the Novelty Track even if you are not interested in building a novelty agent. 

We also have a discussion forum where you can discuss issues and exchange ideas with us and with other participants. On the forum we will also post the latest news and answers to some common questions. You can also leave a comment or like us on our Facebook page where we post latest news and announcements. You can also follow us on Twitter. 

There are typically two further events during a competition. One is the Symposium on AI in Angry Birds which gives the opportunity to present original scientific work related to the problems of developing intelligent Angry Birds playing agents. Please refer to the Call for Papers for more details on the Symposium. The other event is the popular Angry Birds: Man vs Machine Challenge where we test if the best AI agents can already beat humans at playing Angry Birds. 

Jochen Renz and Peng Zhang
Australian National University