Today we are announcing the upcoming launch of the Obstacle Tower Challenge: a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence challenge designed to test the capabilities of intelligent agents and accelerate the research and development of AI. The Obstacle Tower Challenge will be a new competition aimed at testing the vision, control, planning, and generalization abilities of AI agents — capabilities that have yet to be fully tested together.

We built the Challenge on the Obstacle Tower, Unity’s new procedurally generated environment intended for machine learning researchers. The Obstacle Tower is a game-like environment designed to push the boundaries of the human-machine relationship by examining how machines operate in a variety of areas, including computer vision, locomotion skills, and high-level planning – skills that are easy for a human, but for a machine, take learning, practice, and testing.

It is important for the development and advancement of AI methods to have a good benchmark, so that performance and achievements can be fairly and easily compared. This is why we built the Obstacle Tower and why we’re launching our first challenge. We are hoping a little friendly competition will help stimulate AI research and further the studies and creations in reinforcement learning.

The Obstacle Tower environment natively supports the Unity ML-Agents Toolkit and available to download today. We also invite you to read the research paper for more information.

The Obstacle Tower Challenge officially begins on February 11, 2019, at 00:00:01 PST. At that time, entrants can review all the rules and regulations, download our Starter Kit and begin training their agents. Participants will have the opportunity to win prizes in the form of cash, travel vouchers, and Google Cloud Platform credits, valued at over $100,000.

We’ll check back in two weeks for our kick-off. For now, we encourage everyone to mark their calendars and learn more about the Tower!