The aim of the competition is twofold. Firstly MAIC would like to demystify the concept of the artificial intelligence in order to motivate more people (especially students and professionals in science and technology) to specialize in Artificial Intelligence. This is why the participation is as simple as possible.

The work of the participants (teams of two or three members) is to and and implement an algorithm (in a good way) that chooses the action to do at each step (within the time limit) in order to win the game. The idea is to put intelligence as much as possible in the algorithm by finding a good dedicated strategy. The submission of the AI is online and the competition is open to anyone interested.

It is not necessary to be physically present for this contest. On the other hand, MAIC would like to promote some interesting society games from Africa. For at least the first 5 years of the competition, MAIC will focus on an board game from Africa. For 2018 edition, a mobile application is developed for the selected game. At the end of the competition, the best 3 AI are implemented in the 105 mobile application such that anyone can play with them.

Expected contributions for the research in AI. It is well known that the state-of-the-art in AI is very advanced wrt adversarial search, in particular for board games. However, since for MAIC we limit the time for each decision (typically few milliseconds on a classical personal computer), it is not ecient to use generic algorithms without some intelligent adaptations. Here, the challenge is to propose some new fast specialized strategies for the games. Furthermore we will choose not well known games (starting with games from Africa) and we expect some good technical contributions from the different dedicated algorithms for these games. Another side contribution is that the number of people interested by AI will increase (and then the AI research community). MAIC 2018