2009 HUMIES         Simulated Car Racing                Evolutionary Robotics
 
 
 



$10,000 in PRIZES AT THE 6th ANNUAL “HUMIES” AWARDS
FOR HUMAN-COMPETITIVE RESULTS
PRODUCED BY GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION

www.human-competitive.org

CALL FOR ENTRIES

Techniques of genetic and evolutionary computation are being increasingly applied to difficult real-world problems—often yielding results that are not merely academically interesting, but competitive with the work done by creative and inventive humans. Starting at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in 2004, cash prizes have been awarded for human-competitive results that had been produced by some form of genetic and evolutionary computation in the previous year.

Entries are now being solicited for awards totaling $10,000 for the 2009 awards for human-competitive results that have been produced by any form of genetic and evolutionary computation (including, but not limited to genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, learning classifier systems, grammatical evolution, gene expression programming, differential evolution, etc.) and that have been published in the open literature between May 26, 2008 (the deadline for the previous competition) and the deadline for the current competition, Monday June 1, 2009. The competition will be held as part of the 2009 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO) conference to be held in Montreal, Quebec on July 8-12, 2009.

Presentations of entries will be made at GECCO. The awards and prizes will be announced and presented during the GECCO conference.

 


Would you like to challenge yourself? Would you like to drive a racing car? Would you like to put yourself in a salamander’s shoes? Would you like to write programs for cheap highly parallel hardware? Would you like to let your imagination and creativity run free? Join on of the competitions we are organizing for GECCO-2009.

And, if you have your own competition to propose, send an email to Pier Luca, Competition chair for GECCO-2009


Download the Competitions PDF file


Simulated Car Racing
Build your driver to compete in a simulated car race!

Organizers: Daniele Loiacono (Politecnico di Milano)
& Julian Togelius (IDSIA)

This event continues the series of successful competitions organized at CEC-2007, CIG-2007, WCCI-2008, and CIG-2008. The GECCO-2009 edition will involve two tasks. One simulates the typical race in which a driver first races alone on a track to determine its position on starting grid; then the actual race takes place and all the drivers compete on the same track. The second task simulates the days before a car race when the teams set up their car and the team driver adapts its driving style to the new car setup.

For details about the competition, refer to the competition main webpage:
http://cig.dei.polimi.it/?page_id=79   where the software, the rules and regulations, and the manual are available for download.

Contest 1: Learning to drive
The goal of this contest is the design of a controller for a racing car that will compete on a set of unknown tracks first alone (against the clock) and then against other drivers. The controllers perceive the racing environment through a number of sensors that describe the relevant features of the car surroundings (e.g., the track limits, the position of near-by obstacles), of the car state (the fuel level, the engine RPMs, the current gear, etc.), and the current game state (lap time, number of lap, etc.). The controller can perform the typical driving actions (increasing the gear, accelerate, break, steering the wheel left or right, etc.)

See the Brochure here

Contest 2: Optimizing car setup
The second contest simulates the days before a race when mechanics and pilots work on the car setup to find the one which will result in the best performance. The goal is to build an evolutionary algorithm that can replace the team of mechanics and pilots and can find the best car setup (e.g., gear ratio, wing area and angle, spring setup) on a given track.

See the Brochure here


Evolutionary Robotics
Run for your life salamander!

Organizers: Ivan Tanev (Doshisha University)
& Auke Jan Ijspeert (EPFL)
Control a salamander that has to stay alive in the wilderness. Run to your den but meanwhile don’t forget to eat the flies. The competition is based on Webots, the professional robot simulator produced by Olivier Michel from Cyberbotics and the robotic model of a salamander developed by Auke Jan Ijspeert. The competition software will be available for download in late September from this GECCO-2009 competition webpage.



GPUs for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation

Organizers: Simon Harding (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
& Antonino Tumeo (Politecnico di Milano)


This competition focuses on the applications of genetic and evolutionary computation that can maximally exploit the parallelism provided by low-cost consumer graphical cards. The competition will award the best applications both in terms of degree of parallelism obtained, in terms of overall speed-up, and in terms of programming style.

Call: PDF
         swf


Solve Rubik’s Cube!
Parabon Computation the leading on-demand computation utility, will sponsor a $2,000 prize competition in which contestants are challenged to use the company's Frontier Grid Service to evolve a program that can solve an arbitrarily scrambled Rubik's Cube in the minimal number of twists. Computer scientists have previously devised several strong solver algorithms; this competition aims to demonstrate that grid-scale computation and evolutionary processes can do just as well, or better!

Be Creative!

Apply genetic and evolutionary computation to create great artworks! This competition will award the best piece of evolved artwork (being a painting, a music score, a video, etc.) and the best system that exhibits some form of independent creativity. The selection process will involve a jury of experts and also the GECCO-2009 attendees.


More competitions will be announced soon. Stay tuned!

Credits: The three images are (i) a screenshot taken from TORCS, (ii) a screenshot of the salamander model developed by Auke Jan Ijspeert and (iii) an image from “Eden” an interactive, evolutionary sonic ecosystem. Copyright 2000-2005 Jon McCormack.

 
 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2009)
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