SCML Newsletter (June 15th 2021)

This is the third SCML newsletter.

SCML is one of the leagues of ANAC 2021 one of the official competitions of IJCAI 2021.

Important Request: Please upload your agent as soon as possible. The deadline for initial submission is July 1st. Teams with no submissions by July 5th at 23:59 AoE cannot run in the official competition.

1. We updated the scml-visualizer (v0.2.7) resolving some bugs and adding new visualizations. Please check the updated README. You can now visualize negotiations within tournaments and get more statistics in the Tables view.

2. Our community is still growing:

   • 22 teams have already uploaded early versions of their agents. We thank them (compared with 10 two weeks ago!).
   • 5 new registrants on the official website in the last two weeks. We are up to 37 registrants so far in 2021 (77 in total).

3. The second data release with logs from some of the games ran in the tournaments conducted so far will be published online tomorrow. Please check the competition website for the dataset.

4. Please be sure to check each of the following items before submitting your agent

   • Never use print(). You can save log information for debugging as described here.
   • Make sure that you do not use any plotting library in your agent (e.g. matplotlib, seaborn, plotly).
   • Never open a file for writing. You can read data in your agent’s path as described here.

5. Starting June 3rd, only winners from SCML 2020 participated in the tournaments as competitors. The official competition will be conducted the same way.

6. It may be time to make sure that you are using descriptive names for your module and class. It is recommended to make the module name match the team name and the class name match the agent name.

7. Newer versions of NegMAS (0.8.4) and SCML (0.4.5) have been published. If you are using pip, upgrading is as simple as running pip install -U negmas scml.

   • The main feature of SCML 0.4.5 is the addition of before_step() as a callback to your agent sent at the beginning of every day to augment step() sent at the end of the day. You can find an example of its usage here in which we replaced two identical init() and step() implementations with a single before_step().

     We modified the tutorials to use this new method which simplifies some of the book-keeping. In general, you should use step() to look back into what happened in a day and use before_step() to prepare for the new day.

     The main difference between step() and before_step() is that the former has access to market information and utility function information (in OneShot) for the day that just ended while the latter has access to market information and utility function information (in OneShot) for the day that is about to start.

     Note that before_step() is a convenience function and no new information is available to the agent that was not already available.

   • The main feature of NegMAS 0.8.4 is improved support for Genius negotiators. If you are using genius negotiators (not recommended), remember to run negmas genius-setup again after the upgrade.

On Behalf of the SCML Organizing Committee

yasser