Disastrous is an intelligent systems technology demonstrator

In 2014, I led a team of researchers from the University of Southampton and the University of Nottingham to the British Science Festival. In order to demonstrate to school-age children the power and potential applications of intelligent systems to the area of disaster response, we designed and built a browser based game. The objective of the game was to manually assign a set of first responders to emergencies (police to crimes, fire engines to fires and ambulances to casualties), overlayed on a map of southern Birmingham (the location of the Festival). The players were set the challenge of outperforming an intelligent agent completing the same problem on a different workstation, with prizes being awarded to the best human performers (and chocolates being awarded for participation). The browser game itself was coded primarily in Javascript with a Python backend.

Over the course of the festival, almost 1000 school children played the game and the exhibit was one of the most widely visited. Only one person (a teacher) beat the intelligent agent -he got lucky.