Competitions and prizes in artificial intelligence

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There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.

Contents

General machine intelligence

The David E. Rumelhart prize is an annual award for making a "significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition". The prize is $100,000.

The Human-Competitive Award [1] is an annual challenge started in 2004 to reward results "competitive with the work of creative and inventive humans". The prize is $10,000. Entries are required to use evolutionary computing.

The Intel AI Global Impact Festival is an international annual competition held by Intel Corporation [2] for school, and college students with prizes upwards of $15,000. It is about artificial intelligence technology. There are two age brackets in this competition, 13-18 Age Group, and 18 and Above Age Group.

The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is a biannual award given at the IJCAI conference to researcher in artificial intelligence as a recognition of excellence of their career.

The 2011 Federal Virtual World Challenge, advertised by The White House [3] and sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory's Simulation and Training Technology Center, [3] [4] [5] held a competition offering a total of US$52,000 in cash prize awards for general artificial intelligence applications, including "adaptive learning systems, intelligent conversational bots, adaptive behavior (objects or processes)" and more. [6]

The Machine Intelligence Prize is awarded annually by the British Computer Society for progress towards machine intelligence. [7]

The Kaggle – "the world's largest community of data scientists compete to solve most valuable problems".

Conversational behaviour

The Loebner prize is an annual competition to determine the best Turing test competitors. The winner is the computer system that, in the judges' opinions, demonstrates the "most human" conversational behaviour, they have an additional prize for a system that in their opinion passes a Turing test. This second prize has not yet been awarded.

Automatic control

Pilotless aircraft

International Aerial Robotics Competition VT Searching.png
International Aerial Robotics Competition

The International Aerial Robotics Competition is a long-running event begun in 1991 to advance the state of the art in fully autonomous air vehicles. This competition is restricted to university teams (although industry and governmental sponsorship of teams is allowed). Key to this event is the creation of flying robots which must complete complex missions without any human intervention. Successful entries are able to interpret their environment and make real-time decisions based only on a high-level mission directive (e.g., "find a particular target inside a building having certain characteristics which is among a group of buildings 3 kilometers from the aerial robot launch point"). In 2000, a $30,000 prize was awarded during the 3rd Mission (search and rescue), and in 2008, $80,000 in prize money was awarded at the conclusion of the 4th Mission (urban reconnaissance).

Driverless cars

Darpa Grand Challenge DesertToCity.jpg
Darpa Grand Challenge

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a series of competitions to promote driverless car technology, aimed at a congressional mandate stating that by 2015 one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the US Armed Forces should be unmanned. [8] While the first race had no winner, the second awarded a $2 million prize for the autonomous navigation of a hundred-mile trail, using GPS, computers and a sophisticated array of sensors. In November 2007, DARPA introduced the DARPA Urban Challenge, a sixty-mile urban area race requiring vehicles to navigate through traffic. In November 2010 the US Armed Forces extended the competition with the $1.6 million prize Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge to consider cooperation between multiple vehicles in a simulated-combat situation.

Roborace will be a global motorsport championship with autonomously driving, electrically powered vehicles. The series will be run as a support series during the Formula E championship for electric vehicles. [9] This will be the first global championship for driverless cars. [10]

Data-mining and prediction

The Netflix Prize was a competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition was held by Netflix, an online DVD-rental service[ citation needed ]. The prize was $1,000,000.

The Pittsburgh Brain Activity Interpretation Competition [11] will reward analysis of fMRI data "to predict what individuals perceive and how they act and feel in a novel Virtual Reality world involving searching for and collecting objects, interpreting changing instructions, and avoiding a threatening dog." The prize in 2007 was $22,000.

The Face Recognition Grand Challenge (May 2004 to March 2006) aimed to promote and advance face recognition technology. [12]

The American Meteorological Society's artificial intelligence competition involves learning a classifier to characterise precipitation based on meteorological analyses of environmental conditions and polarimetric radar data. [13]

Cooperation and coordination

Robot football

A legged league game from RoboCup 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal Robocup.legged.leauge.2004.nk.jpg
A legged league game from RoboCup 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal

The RoboCup and FIRA are annual international robot soccer competitions. The International RoboCup Federation challenge is by 2050 "a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup." [14]

Logic, reasoning and knowledge representation

Excerpt of a proof in agda2 Agda proof.jpg
Excerpt of a proof in agda2

The Herbrand Award is a prize given by CADE Inc. to honour persons or groups for important contributions to the field of automated deduction. The prize is $1000.

The CADE ATP System Competition (CASC) is a yearly competition of fully automated theorem provers for classical first order logic associated with the CADE and IJCAR conferences. The competition was part of the Alan Turing Centenary Conference in 2012, with total prizes of 9000 GBP given by Google.

The SUMO prize is an annual prize for the best open source ontology extension of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO), a formal theory of terms and logical definitions describing the world. [15] The prize is $3000.

The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge is a cash prize which rewards compression improvements on a specific 100 MB English text file. The prize awards 500 euros for each one percent improvement, up to €50,000. The organizers believe that text compression and AI are equivalent problems and 3 prizes were already given, at around € 2k.

The Cyc TPTP Challenge is a competition to develop reasoning methods for the Cyc comprehensive ontology and database of everyday common sense knowledge. [16] The prize is 100 euros for "each winner of two related challenges".[ citation needed ]

The Eternity II challenge was a constraint satisfaction problem very similar to the Tetravex game. The objective is to lay 256 tiles on a 16x16 grid while satisfying a number of constraints. The problem is known to be NP-complete. [17] The prize was US$2,000,000. [18] The competition ended in December 2010.

Games

The World Computer Chess Championship has been held since 1970. The International Computer Games Association continues to hold an annual Computer Olympiad which includes this event plus computer competitions for many other games.

The Ing Prize was a substantial money prize attached to the World Computer Go Congress, starting from 1985 and expiring in 2000. It was a graduated set of handicap challenges against young professional players with increasing prizes as the handicap was lowered. At the time it expired in 2000, the unclaimed prize was 400,000 NT dollars for winning a 9-stone handicap match.

The AAAI General Game Playing Competition is a competition to develop programs that are effective at general game playing. [19] [20] Given a definition of a game, the program must play it effectively without human intervention. Since the game is not known in advance the competitors cannot especially adapt their programs to a particular scenario. The prize in 2006 and 2007 was $10,000.

The General Video Game AI Competition (GVGAI [21] ) poses the problem of creating artificial intelligence that can play a wide, and in principle unlimited, range of games. Concretely, it tackles the problem of devising an algorithm that is able to play any game it is given, even if the game is not known a priori. Additionally, the contests poses the challenge of creating level and rule generators for any game is given. This area of study can be seen as an approximation of General Artificial Intelligence, with very little room for game dependent heuristics. The competition runs yearly in different tracks: single player planning, [22] two-player planning, [23] single player learning, [24] level [25] and rule [26] generation, and each track prizes ranging from 200 to 500 US dollars for winners and runner-ups.

The 2007 Ultimate Computer Chess Challenge was a competition organised by World Chess Federation that pitted Deep Fritz against Deep Junior. The prize was $100,000.

The annual Arimaa Challenge offered a $10,000 prize until the year 2020 to develop a program that plays the board game Arimaa and defeats a group of selected human opponents. In 2015, David Wu's bot bot_sharp beat the humans, losing only 2 games out of 9. [27] As a result, the Arimaa Challenge was declared over and David Wu received the prize of $12,000 ($2,000 being offered by third-parties for 2015's championship).

2K Australia is offering a prize worth A$10,000 to develop a game-playing bot that plays a first-person shooter. The aim is to convince a panel of judges that it is actually a human player. The competition started in 2008 and was won in 2012. A new competition is planned for 2014. [28]

The Google AI Challenge [29] was a bi-annual online contest organized by the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club and sponsored by Google that ran from 2009 to 2011. Each year a game was chosen and contestants submitted specialized automated bots to play against other competing bots.

Cloudball had its first round in Spring 2012 and finished on June 15. It is an international artificial intelligence programming contest, where users continuously submit the actions their soccer teams will take in each time step, in simple high level C# code.

The International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence for high-school students was established in 2024 and consists of two rounds: in the scientific round, participants solve problems in different subfields of AI, and in the practical round, participants use existing AI tools to produce a visual result.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Blue (chess computer)</span> Chess-playing computer made by IBM

Deep Blue was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM supercomputer. It was the first computer to win a game, and the first to win a match, against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Development began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon University under the name ChipTest. It then moved to IBM, where it was first renamed Deep Thought, then again in 1989 to Deep Blue. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it lost four games to two. It was upgraded in 1997 and in a six-game re-match, it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three. Deep Blue's victory is considered a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence and has been the subject of several books and films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loebner Prize</span> Annual AI competition

The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awarded prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously held textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge would attempt to determine which was which.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science</span> School for computer science in the United States

The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the best computer science programs over the decades. As of 2024 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for No. 1 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allen Newell</span> American cognitive scientist

Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957). He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use. The initial DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 was created to spur the development of technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. The 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots, and new Challenges are still being conceived. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was tasked with building robotic teams to autonomously map, navigate, and search subterranean environments. Such teams could be useful in exploring hazardous areas and in search and rescue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raj Reddy</span> Indian-American computer scientist (born 1937)

Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He was the founding chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.

Arimaa is a two-player strategy board game that was designed to be playable with a standard chess set and difficult for computers while still being easy to learn and fun to play for humans. It was invented between 1997 and 2002 by Omar Syed, an Indian-American computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. Syed was inspired by Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of the chess computer Deep Blue to design a new game which could be played with a standard chess set, would be difficult for computers to play well, but would have rules simple enough for his then four-year-old son Aamir to understand.

A computer poker player is a computer program designed to play the game of poker, against human opponents or other computer opponents. It is commonly referred to as pokerbot or just simply bot. As of 2019, computers can beat any human player in poker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanley (vehicle)</span> Autonomous car

Stanley is an autonomous car created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). It won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, earning the Stanford Racing Team a $2 million prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sebastian Thrun</span> German-American entrepreneur

Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.

In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The field has experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or even decades later.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Progress in artificial intelligence</span> How AI-related technologies evolve

Progress in artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the advances, milestones, and breakthroughs that have been achieved in the field of artificial intelligence over time. AI is a multidisciplinary branch of computer science that aims to create machines and systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Artificial intelligence applications have been used in a wide range of fields including medical diagnosis, economic-financial applications, robot control, law, scientific discovery, video games, and toys. However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore." "Many thousands of AI applications are deeply embedded in the infrastructure of every industry." In the late 1990s and early 21st century, AI technology became widely used as elements of larger systems, but the field was rarely credited for these successes at the time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuela M. Veloso</span> Portuguese-American computer scientist

Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.

John J. Leonard is an American roboticist and Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Leonard is a researcher in simultaneous localization and mapping, and was the team lead for MIT's team at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, one of the six teams to cross the finish line in the final event, placing fourth overall.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer game bot Turing test</span>

The computer game bot Turing test is a variant of the Turing test, where a human judge viewing and interacting with a virtual world must distinguish between other humans and video game bots, both interacting with the same virtual world. This variant was first proposed in 2008 by Associate Professor Philip Hingston of Edith Cowan University, and implemented through a tournament called the 2K BotPrize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition</span> Not-for-profit research institute organisation

The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) is a not-for-profit research institute of the State University System of Florida, with locations in Pensacola and Ocala, Florida. IHMC scientists and engineers investigate a broad range of topics related to building systems aimed at amplifying and extending human cognitive, physical and perceptual capacities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turing test</span> Test of a machines ability to imitate human intelligence

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).

CajunBot refers to the autonomous ground vehicles developed by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for the DARPA Grand Challenges. CajunBot was featured on CNN and on the Discovery Channel science series Robocars.

Computer Arimaa refers to the playing of the board game Arimaa by computer programs.

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