Organizers

Christian Gagné, Université Laval
Amy K. Hoover, University of Central Florida

Goal

The Evolutionary Art, Design, and Creativity Competition at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference showcases the power of evolutionary computation through human-quality artistic works or creativity enhancing experiences generated by or with the assistance of evolution. Entries can be music, images, sculptures, videos, or interactive online experiences, but are not limited to these forms of expression; the goal is that the submissions exhibit some form of independent creativity through genetic and evolutionary computation.

Evaluation

The submissions will be evaluated by a jury of researchers from the evolutionary computation and the technological arts communities. Each submission will be judged on the following criteria: artistic or design merit, innovation, creativity, technical quality, and relevance.

Presentation

Finalists selected by the jury will be invited to present their submission at the competition session, held during the GECCO conference.
The winner of the competition will be announced at the SIGEVO meeting ceremony, on July 10, 2013.

Submission

Entrants must submit: (1) a brief artistic statement illustrating the concept, (2) a short paper describing the technical details and the evolutionary algorithm, and (3) a set of multimedia files, either 5 still images, a video of up to 5 minutes or a sound file of up to 5 minutes,  that demonstrates the output quality of the evolutionary process.  All submissions should be sent to by June 14, 2013.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: June 14, 2013
Conference: July 06-10, 2013

Official Webpage

http://eadcc.geccocompetitions.com

Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano
Antonino Tumeo,  Pacific Northwest Laboratory

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.

Rules and Regulations:

Entrants must submit (1) the application sources with the instructions to compile it and (2) a two page description of the application. Submissions will be reviewed by a committee of researchers from the evolutionary computation community and from industry. Each reviewer will score the submission according to criteria concerning the submitted algorithm, the speed-up it achieves, and its impact on the evolutionary computation community. The total score will be obtained as the weighted sum of the scores achieved.

Submission

Submissions should be mailed to no later than June 14th, 2013. The final scores will be announced during GECCO.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: June 14th 2013
Conference: July 6th-10th 2013

Official Webpage:

http://gpu.geccocompetitions.com/

Organizers:

David Walker,  University of Exeter
Richard Everson, University of Exeter
Jonathan Fieldsend, University of Exeter

This competition is designed to enable participants to exhibit their cutting edge visualisations of evolutionary processes.  The competition has two streams: the first involves visualising the evolution of a solution set to an optimisation problem using data generated during the running of an evolutionary algorithm; this data will be provided by the competition organisers.  In the second stream, researchers can submit a visualisation of their own data, provided it falls within the remit of evolutionary computing.  The goal of the competition is to find visualisations that enhance our understanding of evolutionary processes.

Entries to the Visualising Evolution Competition should comprise a program and relevant data. If the competition data is not used, competitors should submit data collected from running an evolutionary computing algorithm along with their visualisation program. The materials required for submission are as follows:

1. The visualisation program and any instructions necessary to install and run it;
2. Data for the application if the competition data is not used;
3. A two-page writeup describing the visualisation program, the evolutionary process being visualised, and any insights gained through use of the visualisation.

Scoring:

The submissions will be scored by a community panel (TBA), which will judge based on the criteria of originality, quality, and relevance:

• Originality: this criterion is primarily to show that a submission is unique and creative;
• Quality: a submission scoring high on this criterion would be visually appealing, easy to interact with, and easy to interpret;
• Relevance: this criterion evaluates the submission on its relevance and applicability to real world evolutionary problems.

Submission:

All submissions should be sent to by June 10th 2013.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: June 10, 2013
Conference: July 6th-10th 2013

Official Webpage:

http://viz.geccocompetitions.com

Organizers:

Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano
Moshe Sipper, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Goal:

EvoRobocode challenges you to apply Evolutionary Computation to design a competitive robot tank for the Robocode game!
Robocode is a programming game, where the goal is developing in Java a robot tank to fight against other tanks. Battles can be either run in real-time and displayed on the screen or run in a batch mode without visualization.
Robocode also features an on-line tournament system to rank developed tanks.
To make the competition among robots more fair, each tank belongs to different categories based on its code size.  Accordingly, only robots with a similar degree of complexity are allowed to battle together.

Scoring:

Entries will be evaluated by a panel of judges based on different criteria including the performance, the relevance of EC in the development process,  the quality of the documentation, and the degree of innovation of the proposed approach.

Submission:

To enter this competition you have to develop your robot tank and to submit it along with a short paper describing your entry (with a focus on how you applied Evolutionary Computation in the development process).
All submissions should be sent to evorobocode@geccocompetitions.com by June 21, 2013

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: June 21st, 2013
Results will be announced during GECCO 2013 (July 06-10, 2013)

Official Webpage:

http://evorobocode.geccocompetitions.com

Organizers:

Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano
Pier Luca Lanzi, Politecnico di Milano

The goal of the championship is to design 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 (clutch, changing gear, accelerate, break, steering the wheel, etc.)

The championship consists of several races on different tracks divided into legs.
Teams will be allowed to submit a different driver to each leg.
Each Grand Prix consists of three stages:

• the warm-up
• the qualifying
• the race

During warm-up, each driver races alone.
Drivers can collect useful information about the tracks and can tune their behaviors for the next stages. Accordingly, the performance of drivers in this stage is not taken into account for their scores.

During the qualifying stage each driver races alone on each track of the leg.
The eight controllers that bridge the longest distances qualify for the actual Grand Prix races.

During the final races, these best eight drivers race together.
The races consist of eight runs on each of the three tracks. At the end of each race, the drivers are scored using the F1 system: 10 points to the first controller that completes the race, 8 points to the second one, 6 to the third one, 5 to the fourth, 4 to the fifth one, 3 to the sixth, 2 to the seventh, and 1 to the eighth. The driver performing the fastest lap in the race will get two additional points. The driver completing the race with the smallest amount of damage will also get two extra points. The starting grid of the first race will be based on the performance obtained in the qualifying stage. Each subsequent race, the starting grid will be shifted by one so that each driver starts from every position of the starting grid exactly once.

A valid submission would include:

• either a C++ or a Java controller compliant with the examples provided with the client (you should also include all the libraries or packages necessary to compile your controller);
• a brief README.txt with the instructions for compiling and launching your controller;
• 5 slides (plese provide a .ppt or .pptx presentation).

Send your controller per email with subject line [scr2013 entry] to the following address:

Please notice that you are not required to either attend or register to the conferences in order to enter the competition.

Submission deadline: June 21, 2013
Results will be announced during GECCO 2013 (July 06-10, 2013)

Official Webpage:

http://scr.geccocompetitions.com

Organizers

Martina Friese, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
Oliver Flasch, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
Olaf Mersmann, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
Thomas Bartz-Beielstein, Cologne University of Applied Sciences

Goal

This competition is accomplished with a partner from industry who strives to develop
innovative and reliable smart home control systems. Accordingly the goal of this
challenge is to develop accurate and efficient forecasting methods and to apply them
to real-world smart home time series data.

Evaluation

The evaluation is based on the prediction quality. Prediction errors should be minimized.
The error function will be specified and published with the data sets on April, 1st 2013.

Presentation

Finalists selected by the jury will be invited to present their submission at the
competition session, held during the GECCO conference. The winner of the competition
will be announced at the SIGEVO meeting ceremony, on July 10, 2013. Therefore, each
participant has to be registered at GECCO 2013.

Submission

All submissions should be sent via the submission form on the challenges official webpage.

Important Dates

Software and Data Availability: April 01, 2013
Submission deadline: May 31, 2013

Official Webpage

http://ic.geccocompetitions.com