AI Controller for the Game 2048

The goal of the competition is to learn an evaluation function for 2048. It is an addictive single-player, non-deterministic, puzzle game that has recently taken the Internet and mobile devices by storm. One of the reasons of the game's massive popularity is that it is very easy to learn but hard to master. The difficulty of the game together with the simplicity of its rules makes it also an interesting testbed for computational intelligence methods. We propose the competition to encourage comparison of different (evolutionary or not) learning algorithms and evaluation functions.

Organizers:
Wojciech Jaskowski
Marcin Szubert

Submission deadline:
June 30, 2015

Official Webpage:
www.cs.put.poznan.pl/wjaskowski/game-2048-competition-gecco-2015

Black Box Optimization (BBComp)

The Black Box Optimization Competition is the first competition in the continuous domain where test problems are truly black boxes to participants. The only information known to the optimizer and participant is the dimension of the problem, bounds on all variables, and a budget of black box queries.

The budget ranges between 10 and 100 times the problem dimension. It can be viewed as a common budget for expensive optimization.

The competition aims at attacking a growing impact of over-fitting of optimization algorithms to a narrow set of benchmark problems.

Organizers:
Ilya Loshchilov
Tobias Glasmachers

Submission deadline:
June 30, 2015

Official Webpage:
http://bbcomp.ini.rub.de/

Combinatorial Black-Box Optimization (CBBOC)

This is CBBOC's inaugural year. It's designed to provide the GECCO community with detailed performance comparisons of a wide variety of meta-heuristics and hyper-heuristics on combinatorial problems, where the real-world problems which induce combinatorial problems have been categorized into those with no training time (good fit for out-of-the-box algorithms such as the Parameter-less Population Pyramid), those with short training time (good fit for typical evolutionary algorithms), and those with long training time (good fit for hyper-heuristics). Competitors choose which category or categories they want to submit to. The competition problems will be randomly generated by a meta-class based on NK-Landscapes.

Organizers:
Brian W. Goldman
Jerry Swan
Daniel R. Tauritz

Submission deadline:
June 1, 2015

Official Webpage:
http://web.mst.edu/~tauritzd/CBBOC/

The General Video Game AI

The GVG-AI Competition explores the problem of creating controllers for general video game playing. How would you create a single agent that is able to play any game it is given? Could you program an agent that is able to play a wide variety of games, without knowing which games are to be played? The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (2015) will host the second edition of this competition, where participants will count on 30 different games for training, a set of 10 games for validation, and a secret set of 10 test games for computing the final rankings.

Organizers:
Diego Perez
Spyridon Samothrakis
Julian Togelius
Tom Schaul
Simon M. Lucas

Submission deadline:
15th June, 2015

Official Webpage:
http://www.gvgai.net/

Geometry Friends Game AI

Build AI players for Geometry Friends, a 2-player cooperative platform puzzle game. These players should be able to deal with a dynamic simulated physics environment (with gravity and friction), be capable of solving puzzles and coordinate its actions to perform the resolution of the puzzles. Each player controls one of the two characters with distinct capabilities: a yellow circle or a green rectangle. The circle can jump and the rectangle can change its shape. Both characters can move horizontally. Players will need to combine the abilities of their characters in a world with platforms to collect a set of diamonds in the least amount of time.

Organizer:
Rui Prada

Submission deadline:
June 26, 2015

Official Webpage:
http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/geometryfriends/

Industrial Challenge: Recovering missing information in heating system operating data

The Industrial Challenge will be held in the competition session at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. It poses difficult real-world problems provided by industry partners from various fields. Highlights of the Industrial Challenge include interesting problem domains, real-world data and realistic quality measurement

Organizers:
Martina Friese
Andreas Fischbach
Thomas Bartz-Beielstein

Submission deadline:
June 22, 2015

Official Webpage:
www.spotseven.de/gecco-challenge/gecco-challenge-2015/

Simulated Car Racing Championship

This long standing championship awards the enthusiasts of  AI games, autonomous vehicles and car racing. In a nutshell this is all about applying/comparing/creating various computational intelligence approaches to design the best autonomous car controllers and having fun through a car racing game. The competitors are asked 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.)

Organizers:
Daniele Loiacono
Frank Neumann
Mohammad Reza Bonyadi
Samadhi Nallaperuma

Submission deadline:
June 20, 2015

Official Webpage:
http://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~optlog/SCR2015/index.html

The Virtual Creatures Competition

The Virtual Creatures Competition will be held in the competition session at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. The contest's purpose is to highlight progress in virtual creatures research and showcase evolutionary computation's ability to craft interesting well-adapted creatures with evolved morphologies and controllers. Video entries demonstrating evolved virtual creatures will be judged by technical achievement, aesthetic appeal, innovation, and perceptual animacy (perceived aliveness).

Organizers:
Joel Lehman
Dan Lessin

Submission deadline:
June 12, 2015

Official Webpage:
www.cs.utexas.edu/~joel/virtual_creatures_contest2015/

Wind Farm Layout Optimization

Wind farm design has long been a favored application across evolutionary computation due to its complexity, the wake capture of a field being a difficult value to optimize analytically, and its pertinence to the world of alternative energy. We propose the following competition to create a basis of comparison for the existing algorithms and to encourage both new ways to solve the wind optimization problem and a new mindset for the optimization goal.

Organizers:
Sylvain Cussat-Blanc
Dennis Wilson
Silvio Rodrigues
Kalyan Veeramachaneni

Submission deadline:
June 15th, 2015

Official Webpage:
www.irit.fr/wind-competition