Simulated Car Racing Contest II:
Optimizing Car Setup @ GECCO-2009
Luigi Cardamone, Daniele Loiacono, Julian Togelius, and Pier Luca
Lanzi
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009

What is the optimization competition?
 The goal is to submit an optimization algorithm for a
challenging problem
 The optimization problem consists in finding the best car
setup that achieve the highest performance in a particular
track
 The submitted algorithms will be compared in three different
tracks
 Challenges:
Limited amount of time available for the optimization
process
Fake parameters that increase the search space
No prior knowledge about the parameters and the track
used for the optimization process
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009

The competitors
 Two entries have been submitted to the competition:
Pietro Versari, Stefano Morini, Stefano Cagnoni -
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università
degli Studi di Parma
Jorge Muñoz Fuentes - Carlos III University of Madrid,
Department of Computer Science
 One more entry has been considered:
Basic Genetic Algorithm (by Luigi Cardamone et al.,
Politecnico di Milano)
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009

Scoring process
 Scoring process involved three tracks (unknown to the
competitors):
Alpine (19 parameters)
Michigan (19 parameters)
Forza (50 parameters)
 For each track, 3 runs of each optimization technique have
been performed
 Each run is stopped after that 10.000.000 of game tics
expires (approximately 1 hour of computation)
 The champion of each run was evaluated scoring the
distance raced in the first 10.000 game tics of a race
 The scores for each race are based on the Formula 1 scoring
system
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009

Alpine
Track Alpine
9500,00
9000,00
8764,30 8762,33
8500,00
8376,18
8000,00
7500,00
7000,00
V&M&C Jorge Luigi
Avg Dist Raced
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009

Michigan
Track Michigan
13500,00
13000,00
12666,81
12500,00
12385,15
12210,79
12000,00
11500,00
11000,00
10500,00
V&M&C Jorge Luigi
Avg Dist Raced
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009

Forza
Track Forza
12000,00
11583,70
11500,00
11105,02 11169,33
11000,00
10500,00
10000,00
9500,00
V&M&C Jorge Luigi
Avg Dist Raced
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009

Final Results
V&M&C Jorge Luigi
Alpine 10,00 8,00 6,00
Michigan 8,00 10,00 6,00
Forza 10,00 6,00 8,00
Total 28,00 24 20
Versari, Morini and Cagnoni are the Winners
of GECCO-2009 Optimization Competition!
SCR Contest II: optimizing car setup @ GECCO-2009