SCML Newsletter (July 15th 2021)

This is the fifth SCML newsletter.

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

1. If you are using a data file in your agent, please DO NOT use pickle. The reason is that pickle is sensitive to the version number of all libraries involved and we cannot guarantee that our servers will have the same versions used to save the file. We cannot guarantee that your agent will behave normally if you are using pickle. Recommended storage formats are csv and json. For binary formats, check feather.
2. Our community is STILL growing:
   • 59 agents have been uploaded so far (14 in the last two weeks) ).
   • 33 teams are currently active in the online-competition.
   • 6 new registrants on the official website in the last two weeks. We are up to 53 registrants so far in 2021 (93 in total).
3. The fifth 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).
   • In SCML, agents are not allowed to pass information between world simulations. Never open a file for writing. You can read data in your agent’s path as described here. Trying to write to the server’s HDD, will lead to disqualification.
   • Do not use pickle.
5. Newer versions of NegMAS (0.8.6) and SCML (0.4.7) have been published. If you are using pip, upgrading is as simple as running pip install -U negmas scml. This time, we focused on improving synchronized offering (through SAOSyncController and OneshotSyncAgent). There are bugfixes so it is recommended to upgrade your environment.

Important Reminder You MUST submit a 2-pages report of the agent by the deadline of the official competition August 10th at 23:59 AoE. Failure to do so can result in immediate disqualification. Please check the CFP Page 3 (Academic report) for details about this requirement.

We thank our sponsors for supporting SCML: - NEC-AIST AI Collaborative Research Laboratory - BIRD Initiative

We also thank Brown University for hosting our website (https://scml.cs.brown.edu)

On Behalf of the SCML Organizing Committee

yasser