TL;DR : Make your first submission to this exciting new Reinforcement Learning challenge using : https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-challenge

Only the final submission made by each team will be accepted for evaluation at the end of each round. Please be sure that your final submission before the end of each round reflects your best work, and be sure to re-submit that work if necessary.

The timeline of this challenge has been extended. More details here : https://discourse.aicrowd.com/t/announcement-unity-obstacle-tower-challenge-extension/885/2

The Obstacle Tower is a procedurally generated environment consisting of an endless number of floors to be solved by a learning agent. It is designed to be a new benchmark for learning agents specifically in the areas of computer vision, locomotion skills, high-level planning, and generalization. The Obstacle Tower Challenge combines platforming-style gameplay with puzzles and planning problems, all in a tower with an endless number of floors for agents to learn to solve. Critically, the floors become progressively more difficult as the agent progresses. To learn more about the Obstacle Tower, read our full paper on the environment here.

Your mission in the Obstacle Tower Challenge is to create an agent that can successfully navigate the Obstacle Tower environments we have created.

Dates

Round 1

Start Date : 12:01 a.m. PST on Monday, February 11th, 2019;

: 12:01 a.m. PST on Monday, February 11th, 2019; End Date: ~~Friday, March 31st, 2019~~ 11:59 p.m. PST Tuesday, April, 30th, 2019

Round 1 Winner Announcement: 12:01 a.m. PST on Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

Round 2

Start Date : 12:01 a.m. PST on ~~Monday, April 15, 2019~~ Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

: 12:01 a.m. PST on ~~Monday, April 15, 2019~~ Deadline: 11:59 p.m. PST ~~Friday, May 24th, 2019~~ Monday, July 15th, 2019

Round 2 Winner Announcement: 12:01 a.m. PST on Thursday, August 1st, 2019

Teams

Up to a maximum of 4 people can enter the Obstacle Tower Challenge as a team. You must be at least 18 years of age and a resident of certain countries to enter the Challenge. For more eligibility criteria, please read the Official Rules (linked below).

Entry

To create an Entry clone the Challenge Starter Kit and then develop code to create and train a model that is able to interact with the Obstacle Tower Environment (the agent). The goal is to create an agent that can advance further than everyone else’s. There are two Rounds, the first with a 25 level environment and the second with 100 levels!

Evaluation Criteria

In each round, we will run each agent through the applicable Obstacle Tower environment and evaluate how the agent does across 5 randomly generated seeds and then the entries will be ranked, from most to least, in accordance to the average of the number of levels reached in each seed. Ties will be broken on the basis of the average number of doors and keys collected by the agent across the aforementioned 5 seeds. In order to move onto Round 2, an Agent must be able to reach an average score of 5 in Round 1. If fewer than 20 are able to do so in Round 1, the average level requirement will be 4.

Rules

For the full requirements, please carefully read the Official Rules, available here.

Prizes

Cash and Travel Credit Prizes provided by Unity and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Credits sponsored by Google! (Prizes are per team)

Round 1

Up to the 50 highest ranking teams will receive $1,100 USD worth of GCP credits per Team. (Round 1 Average Retail Value (ARV) per Team Prize is $1,100 USD and for all Round 1 prizes worth 55,000 USD)

Round 2

First Place (ARV $19,500)

Cash Prize of $12,000 USD

Travel Credit* of up to $2,500

GCP credits worth $5,000 USD in value

Second Place (ARV $15,500)

Cash Prize of $8,000 USD

Travel Credit* of up to $2,500

GCP credits worth $5,000 USD in value

Third Place (ARV $12,500)

Cash Prize of $5,000 USD

Travel Credit* of up to $2,500

GCP credits worth $5,000 USD in value

* Travel Credits are a reimbursement for travel to a mutually (Unity and Team) agreed upon AI or Machine Learning related conference within 1 year of the announcement of winners to go towards economy class round trip airfares from your nearest airport to the city of conference and up to 3 days of accommodations (food is not included) and an opportunity to publish their Challenge Result

General Resources

Obstacle Tower research paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01378

Environment GitHub page: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-env

Please visit the starter-kit page first for our comprehensive instruction to start this competition: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-challenge

Learn how to train an Agent using Google Cloud Platform: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-env/tree/master/examples/gcp_training.md

Contact Us

Discussion Forum : https://discourse.aicrowd.com/c/unity-obstacle-tower-challenge

Gitter Channel : https://gitter.im/AIcrowd-HQ/unity-obstacle-tower-challenge

We strongly encourage you to use the public channels mentioned above for communications between the participants and the organizers. In extreme cases, if there are any queries or comments that you would like to make using a private communication channel, then you can send us an email at: