MAIC: Mify International Artificial Intelligence Contest

MAIC is a yearly international AI competition that started in 2017. The different participants have to find the best way (algorithm) to play a turn-taking strategy game with a time limit for each decision. MAIC aims to: 1) demystify/promote the concept of artificial intelligence, 2) make some society games better known, and 3) contribute to the development of some fast dedicated algorithms in an adversarial environment.

This competition is organized in 3 primary phases (group phase, semi-final, final) with the possibility to improve the qualified AI between two steps. The AI submission is online and does not require being physically present during the competition. People can compete from anywhere in the world, and only a basic background in algorithmics is needed.

During the contest, each team of two or three members proposes an implementation of a strategy to win a two-players turn-taking society game. MAIC tries to be as simple and flexible as possible. This allows the participant to focus on their AI and how to improve it. Hence, the material provided to them contains all graphical interfaces of the game and several helpers to ease the implementation of their intelligent agents. To the best of our knowledge, MAIC is the first such AI competition held by African organizations.

MAIC 2022 will take place from October to December 2022. The detailed schedule is available here (https://maic.mify-ai.com/maic2022-calendar).

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