CPE/CSC 480 Fall 2004 Assignment 3: Wumpus World Agent

Note: Since the end of the quarter is close already, you can choose to do either Assignment 3 (Wumpus World) or Assignment 4 (Robocode). You must do both parts of the same assignment, i.e. you can not do Part 1 of Assignment 3 and Part 2 of Assignment 4, or vice versa. I will adjust the overall score for the assignments accordingly.

The goal for this task is to build an agent that can navigate the Wumpus World successfully: It should find a safe path to the gold (if there exists one), pick up the gold, return to the exit, and leave the cave. Use the characteristicsfor the Wumpus World as discussed in the class and described in the textbook.

You can make the following assumptions:

• there is only one Wumpus in the world
• the world is rectangular, and your agent knows this
• your agent does not know the size of the world
• a square may contain multiple objects and agents, provided that the semantics fit (e.g. a pit can't contain anything else, or an agent in the same square as a wumpus gets eaten)

An important aspect of this task is the representation of the knowledge the agent has (e.g. the state of the Wumpus World), and the reasoning the agent performs in order to decide about the safety or risk of squares. It is also advisable for your agent to indicate its internal world model to the user. This could be an additional display showing the agent's knowledge of the Wumpus World at a particular point, or a text-based printout of the current status.

You should use the AIILE environment for this task as well. Version 0.5 of AIILE contains a few minor changes for the Wumpus World environment. You can download it from the AIILE environment Web page.

This task is to be performed in two parts. In the first part, you determine the methods and techniques you use for the representation of knowledge about the Wumpus World and for reasoning, e.g. about the properties of the squares, or the location of the wumpus.

Part 1: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Describe your knowledge representation and reasoning methods in your README file. Submit the README file as the first part of the assignment and make sure that the corresponding source code is documented. In the implementation for this part, your agent needs to determine the properties of a given square, based on the direct information received from the environment, and on previously gathered information. So for each of the adjacent squares of the current square the agent should determine the following conditions:

Please use the notation as indicated above. We will use the following grading guidelines for Part 1:

• 4 points: Knowledge representation
• 4 points: Reasoning abilities of the agent
• 2 points for the README file and documentation of the source code

Part 2: Going for the Gold

Based on your first part, the agent now has to find a path to the square with the gold, pick up the gold, return to the starting square, and exit the Wumpus world. The performance of the agent is scored as follows:

The search costs for the agent are similar to the ones for the previous assignment:

• 1 for each interaction with the manager (e.g. for each query about a tile, and for each update from the agent to the environment)
• 3 for each distance hint from the manager
• 5 for each direction hint from the manager

The path costs for the agent are:

• 20 for a move from one tile to the next,
• 10 for shooting the arrow.

In this task, the agent needs to perform its activities in an online mode: It can only detect the properties of a location once it is there. While it would be nice for the agent to explore the cave from the safety of its home base and then simply take the safe route to the gold (if there is one), it would diminish the purpose of the game.

The configuration for the Wumpus world with the location of the gold, pits, wumpus, and obstacles will be provided through the environment. Your agent is expected to work not only with sample environments, but with any environment that adheres to the Wumpus World specification as provided in the textbook and in the description of this assignment.

Grading Guidelines

I will use the following grading guidelines for Part 2:

• 7 points: Successful completion of the task
• 6 points: Performance of the agent
• 2 points for the README file and documentation of the source code

Wumpus World Team Option