CMUnited-98 agents are capable of perception, cognition, and action. By perceiving the world, they build a model of its current state. Then, based on a set of behaviors, they choose an action appropriate for the current world state.
A driving factor in the design of the agent architecture is the fact that the simulator operates in fixed cycles of length 100 msec. As presented in Section [1], the simulator accepts commands from clients throughout a cycle and then updates the world state all at once at the end of the cycle. Only one action command (dash, kick, turn, or catch) is executed for a given client during a given cycle.
Therefore, agents (simulator clients) should send exactly one action command to the simulator in every simulator cycle. If more than one command is sent in the same cycle, a random one is executed, possibly leading to undesired behavior. If no command is sent during a simulator cycle, an action opportunity has been lost: opponent agents who have acted during that cycle may gain an advantage.
In addition, since the simulator updates the world at the end of every cycle, it is advantageous to try to determine the state of the world at the end of the previous cycle when choosing an action for the current cycle. As such, the basic agent loop during a given cycle t is as follows:
While the above algorithm defines the overall agent loop, much of the challenge is involved in updating the world model effectively and choosing an appropriate action. The remainder of this section goes into these processes in detail.