The closing date for entries to a competition co-hosted by Microsoft has been extended to the end of December, and the initial kickoff round of the tournament has been held at AIIDE 2018, a workshop on artificial intelligence and digital entertainment.

The closing date for the competition has been extended so teams can enter up till the end of December because the opening submission system was delayed.  The MARLO (Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Malmo) is this year's competition as part of Project Malmo. Malmo is built on the popular multiplayer game Minecraft, and is an AI research tool for investigating how to train intelligent agents to collaborate. It originated in 2016 as an open-ended platform to advance the state of the art in AI research, especially reinforcement learning in a complex world.

The Malmo platform provides an API which enables access to actions, observations (i.e. location, surroundings, video frames, game statistics) and other general data that Minecraft provides. MARLO is a wrapper for Malmo that provides a higher level API and more standardized RL-friendly environment for scientific study.

The competition has already started, and the opening kickoff tournament took place at the 14th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment in Edmonton, AB, Canada. The teams taking part in this tournament competed in a round robin to achieve the highest scores across three different games—Mobchase, Buildbattle, and Treasurehunt. The top three eligible teams will each be presented with the Progress Award, a travel grant worth up to $2,500 for use toward a relevant conference at which they can publish their competition results.

Submissions are now being accepted for the second round of the competition, in which new teams will compete to be eligible to go on to the final. To enter the competition, you need to design learning agents that can either collaborate with other agents to complete tasks, or compete with other agents. The tasks vary in difficulty across 3D games. The competition is being co-hosted by Microsoft, Queen Mary University of London, and CrowdAI, and is open to participants worldwide through December 31.

To participate in the Challenge, you register on crowdai.org and enter the Challenge. You play in a self-hosted GitLab instance of crowdAI, and the crowdAI bot runs an evaluation of your agent running against a fixed random agent as the competitor. After evaluation, the leaderboard is updated, and those at the top of the leaderboard will be invited to take part in the finals.

More Information

MARLO Challenge On CrowdAI

MARLO On GitHub

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