The Text-Based Adventure AI Competition

In 2016-2018 at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games, the authors of this paper ran a competition for agents that can play classic text-based adventure games. This competition fills a gap in existing game artificial intelligence (AI) competitions that have typically focused on traditional card/board games or modern video games with graphical interfaces. By providing a platform for evaluating agents in text-based adventures, the competition provides a novel benchmark for game AI with unique challenges for natural language understanding and generation. This paper summarizes the three competitions ran in 2016-2018 (including details of open-source implementations of both the competition framework and our competitors) and presents the results of an improved evaluation of these competitors across 20 games.