==============================================================================
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX USA

The TacTex Starter Agent
(for the Trading Agent Competition - Supply Chain Management scenario)

Copyright 2006 David Pardoe and Peter Stone.  All rights reserved.  You are
free to use, modify, and redistribute this software for noncommercial
purposes so long as you acknowledge its use in any publications or releases
of code or binaries.  This software is provided "as is" and without warranty
of any kind.

This release includes the TAC SCM Java AgentWare 0.9.6 Beta (scmaw.jar) and
the TAC SCM Game Data Toolkit 0.4.1 beta (scmlogtool.jar), both developed
by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.  The latest versions, including
source code, may be downloaded from the TAC homepage (www.sics.se/tac).

Citation: to cite use of this agent, we request that you cite the TacTex
agent, from which it is derived:
David Pardoe and Peter Stone.  TacTex-05: A Champion Supply Chain Management
Agent.  In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, pp.  1489–94, July 2006.  

Here is a bibtex entry:
@InProceedings{AAAI06-tac, 
	author="David Pardoe and Peter Stone",
	title="{T}ac{T}ex-05: A Champion Supply Chain Management Agent",
	booktitle="Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on
		Artificial Intelligence",
	month="July", year="2006", pages="1489--94",
	url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dpardoe/papers/AAAI06.pdf"
} 
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The purpose of this agent is to serve as a starting point for new participants
in the TAC SCM competition.  The agent is based on TacTex, winner of the 2005
and 2006 competitions.  The basic infrastructure of TacTex has been left in 
place, but all agent strategies have been replaced with simple heuristics.
(More information on TacTex is available at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~TacTex)

The agent is designed for the 2006 TAC SCM competition rules and the 
corresponding server (version 0.8.18 at the time of the competition), 
although it will likely remain compatible with any server updates in the 
near future. All files needed to run the agent are included.  Currently 
available servers include tac3.sics.se:8080 through tac6.sics.se:8080, or 
you can download and run your own server.  For information on the rules, 
servers, or TAC in general, please see the TAC homepage: www.sics.se/tac

The agent will first need to be compiled using compile.sh

To run the agent:
java -cp scmaw.jar:. se.sics.tasim.aw.client.Main -config <config file>.conf
(Note: Windows users should replace the ":" with ";".)

When the agent is run, the server will automatically create a new game.  There
is no need to manually start and join a game on the server.

An agent requires TWO different configuration files to run.  The first is 
the .conf file.  A Sample.conf file has been provided - this file will need
to be modified with the desired agent name, password, and server; just replace
the current values of NAME, PASSWORD, and SERVER.  The second configuration
file will be read by the agent at the start of each game to set agent
parameters such as the classes to use for various tasks.  The name of this
file is <name>Config.txt, where <name> is the complete name of the agent
(e.g., Agent1 and Agent2 would need separate configuration files).  The
SampleConfig.txt file provided will need to be renamed before the agent is
run.  The reason for this naming system is that no parameters can be passed
to the agent, so the agent name is used in place of parameters.

By parsing the game logs provided after each game, is is possible to restore
the state of the agent on any game day and run the agent for that day.  This
is very useful for debugging the agent.  

To run the agent named <name> on day <date> using a particular
<game log> (a slg.gz file) for a game that it played in:
java -cp scmaw.jar:scmlogtool.jar:. TACAgentParserMain -handler 
	TACAgentParserHandler -file <game log> -agentName <name> -date <date>

The easiest way to run the agent multiple times is with a simple script
such as run.sh

The agent is released "as-is" with no support promised.  However, we 
request that you let us know if you are using it for your research 
purposes, and we will do our best to respond to any problems that may 
arise when trying to run it.

More information about the agent is available at:
	www.cs.utexas.edu/~TacTex/starterAgent
To contact us, email:
	dpardoe@cs.utexas.edu.