Organizers

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

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 11, 2012.

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 15, 2012.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: June 15, 2012
Conference: July 07-11, 2012

Official Webpage

http://eadcc.sigevolution.org

Organizers:

Martin V. Butz, University of Würzburg, Germany

The Demolition Derby 2012 competition challenges you to design a racing car controller that manages to effectively crash into other cars while avoiding being crashed itself. Thus, the goal is simple: Wreck all opponent cars by crashing into them without getting wrecked yourself.

Demolition Derby takes place on a large circular track (surface: asphalt, length: 640m, width: 90m, number of laps: 1000). The sensor information is egocentric fostering the design and optimization of local interaction routines. The last car standing is declared winner of the match.

The most important sensors and actuators of the competition are:

1. 36 noiseless opponent sensors with a range of 300m indicate the presence of opponents around the own car.
2. 19 noiseless track edge distance sensors (200m range) indicate the local track outline.
3. Other track information sensors indicate the orientation on the track as well as the locality with respect to the track edges.
4. Car state sensors indicate the current speed, gear, rpm of the engine, as well as the wheel speeds.
5. Damage sensors indicate the current own damage as well as the damage induced to other cars.
6. Actuators include all usual car control options (using the clutch, changing gears, accelerating, breaking, steering).

The damage model is such that the goal is to crash into other cars coming from the side or behind. Front crashes as well as crashes into walls do not result in damage. This is done to foster strategic driving and to decrease randomness in the results.

All racing controllers participating in Demolition Derby have to qualify for the final showdown match by competing with each other in preliminary 1-vs-1-matches. The best eight controllers then fight each other at the same time in ten final matches. The car that wins most often in these final matches will be the Winner of the Demolition Derby Competition. 

Participation is open to anybody. You do not need to participate in the conference to send an entry. However, the price will be received by the best competitor that also participates in the conference.

Please send your controller per email with subject line [demolition derby entry] to the following address:

Required files for Java Users: Please send the necessary sources and compiled .class-files. Clarify in the text of your mail which class file is the main that is to be started.

Required files for C++ Users: Please send the source files necessary to compile the code to us.

Please include your full name and address (and optionally affiliation) in the mail as well as a indicative name for your controller (to be used in the competition rankings).

Important Dates:

The submission deadline for GECCO 2012 is July 2, 2012

Official Webpage

http://cm.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/competitions

Simon Harding, IDSIA, Switzerland

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 12 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 12 separate scores.

Submission

Submissions should be mailed to no later than June 22nd, 2012. The final scores will be announced during GECCO.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: June 22nd 2012
Conference: July 7th-11th 2012

Official Webpage:

http://www.gpgpgpu.com/gecco2012/

Organizers:

Nicholas Sinnott-Armstrong, Dartmouth Medical School
Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano

This competition aims to enable participants to exhibit their cutting edge visualizations of evolutionary processes. The competition is a general set of guidelines and a framework within which a variety of visualization and interaction technologies can be used to portray current work in evolutionary computing in a compelling and elucidating manner. Hopefully, by visualizing these processes and applying techniques from scientific visualization and visual analytics, new insights and a broader understanding will be achieved.

The Visualizing Evolution Competition submission guidelines require the submission of a program and relevant data that can be used to elucidate some aspect of the EC community. The data must be collected from running an evolutionary computing algorithm, or can be input to such a program running as part of the visualization system. The materials required for submission are as follows:

1. The application program and any instructions necessary to install and run it.
2. Test data for the application.
3. A two page writeup describing the application, the evolutionary process being modeled, and any insights gained through use of the program.

Scoring:

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

1. Originality: This criterion is primarily to show that a submission is unique and creative.
2. Quality: A submission high in this criterion would be visually appealing, easy to interact with, and easy to interpret.
3. Applicability: This is primarily to evaluate a submission on its ability to visualize data relevant to real world tests in the EC community.

Submission:

All submissions should be sent to by June 25, 2012

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: June 25, 2012

Official Webpage:

https://sites.google.com/site/visualizingevo/

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 by June 22, 2012

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: June 22th, 2012
Results will be announced during GECCO 2012 (July 07-11, 2012)

Official Webpage:

https://sites.google.com/site/evorobocode/

 

Organizers:

Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano
Luigi Cardamone, 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 [scr2012 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 25, 2012
Results will be announced during GECCO 2012 (July 07-11, 2012)

Official Webpage:

http://games.ws.dei.polimi.it/competitions/scr/