The Taboo Challenge Competition

Games have always been a popular domain of AI research, and they have been used for many recent competitions. Reaching human-level performance, however, often either focuses on comprehensive world knowledge or solving decision-making problems with unmanageable solution spaces. Building on the popular Taboo board game, the Taboo Challenge Competition addresses a different problem ' that of bridging the gap between the domain knowledge of heterogeneous agents trying to jointly identify a concept without making reference to its most salient features. The competition, which was run for the first time at the 2017 IJCAI conference, aims to provide a simple testbed for diversity-aware AI where the focus is on integrating independently engineered AI components, while offering a scenario that is challenging enough to test the concept, yet simple enough not to require mastering general commonsense knowledge or natural language understanding. We describe the design of and preparation for the competition, and discuss the results and lessons learned.