Competitions and prizes in artificial intelligence

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

A legged league game from RoboCup 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal.

General machine intelligence

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

The Human-Competitive Awards are an annual challenge started in 2004. The prize is $10,000. Entries are required to use evolutionary computing.

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 (with learning AI Ultra Hal winning in 2007, Jabberwacky in 2005 and 2006, and A.L.I.C.E. before that), they have an additional prize for a system that in their opinion passes a Turing test. This second prize has not yet been awarded.

Driverless cars

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. 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.

Robot soccer

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."

Games

The annual Arimaa challenge match. The challenge offers 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.