ART Testbed: Documentation: Building Testbed Agents

The Game Designer is the tool that allows to specify games that later will be run using the Sim. This specification is stored in a XML file that will be the input for the Sim. To run this tool, use the script startGameDesigner.bat under Windows or startGameDesigner.sh under Linux. You can also type java testbed.gameDesigner.ARTGameDesigner in a termial/console

The interface is quite simple. Through the File menu you can create a New empty game specification, Save a specification, Save the current specification using a different name, adjust the preferences of the ART Game Designer and Exit of the application. When you run the ART Game Designer you start with an empty specification with a generic name "MyGame". The '*' after the window label "ART Game Designer" (see previous figure) indicates that the current specification has been modified and not yet saved.

The first thing is to give a name to this game specification, the GameID. The "Game Config File" indicates the XML file that contains the specification that is being edited. If you are editing an empty specification, this field will take its value after the first Save.

The ART Game Designer Preferences dialog (File/Preferences) allows you to define the root directories for agent definitions (the directory where there are the XML specifications of the participants) and the directory where there are the game specifications. This directories are only used to accelerate the process of finding participants or load previous specifications when using the ART Game Designer, they don't have any effect on the game specification..

In the following sections we will describe the general parameters and how to add participants to a game specification.

In this section we describe the meaning of the game parameters that can be specified in the "General Parameters" tab.

Game Parameter	Variable Description
Time steps	Specifies the number of timesteps for which to run the game.
Painting-Eras	Specifies the number of possible expertise eras to which paintings can belong.
Client Fee	Specifies the fixed fee (f) paid by clients to appraisers.
Certainty Cost	Specifies the fixed fee paid by opinion requesters to opinion providers for a certainty.
Opinion Cost	Specifies the fixed fee (cp) paid by opinion requesters to opinion providers.
Reputation Cost	Specifies the fixed fee (cr) paid by reputation requesters to reputation providers.
Sensing Cost Accuracy ratio	Specifies a: relating opinion-generation cost to resulting opinion error distribution standard deviation.
Old Client Share Influence	Specifies q: the influence of previous client share on client share in the next timestep.
Average clients per agent	Determines the total number of clients per timestep (when this parameter is multiplied times the number of agents who join the game).
Thread-Wait	Specifies the number of seconds the simulation should wait before terminating an agent's method execution (to prevent hanging).
Random mode	description
Certainty Messages/Time step	Specifies the maximum number of certainty request that an agent can send at each time step.
Opinion Messages/painting	Specifies the maximum number of opinion requests that an agent can send at each time step for each of its paintings.
Number of expertise values	.description.
Maximum expertise value	.description.
Amount of expertise change	.description.
Number of eras to change expertise	.description.
Deny use of self opinions	If this is true the appraiser cannot use its own opoinions, only opoinions from third party appraisers.
Safe mode	Specifies if the Sim will run in safe mode (safe mode avoids that wrong agents can get the control of the execution for a long time, however slows down the execution)

To add a new agent or set of agents, first select the file with the XML specification of the agent (IMPORTANT: do not select the .class or .jar, you have to select the .xml file). Once selected, the name of the file appears in the textfield "File Name". Then choose the number of instances that will participate of that type of agent in the game, give a name to the agents and select if they will be Dummy agents or not. When you press "Add" a new line describing the new addintion will appear in the right panel. Delete removes the selected entry.

Naming the agents: The name of the agent has to be a unique identifier. When you specify a set of agents you have to use the pattern $c$ that will be substituted by a number once the agents are created in the Sim during the execution.

For example, the name in the figure "cheating_$c$" will become "cheating_1", "cheating_2", ... , "cheating_5". You can put the $c$ pattern any place in the name of the agent.