NERO Machine Learning Tournament

Wow can't believe this is still going. I had a chance to work with the original creator, Ken Stanley, during a summer internship at a University of Texas media lab. We had a ton of fun training up teams of robots -- my favorite was making a team of cowards that would cower behind walls when they would see a turret.

This project and the original used a variant of his rtNeat neural network software:

http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?rtNEAT

Since then he's moved onto the University of Florida and created some new variants. One that is particularly interesting to me is cgNeat, for creating evolving, procedural content for games. It was used to evolve new weapons and particle systems for a diablo-like loot system for this game:

http://gar.eecs.ucf.edu/

You, sir, have just stolen many many hours of my life. I am very thankful, this is awesome. My wife, on the other hand, doesn't know you but she hates you already.

I've been working on OpenNERO this semester, along with Igor Karpov (lead dev), Adam Dziuk, Leif Johnson, and Risto Miikkulainen.

The idea of this tournament is that you are training a population of evolving agents, each controlled by a separate artificial neural network. It's effectively a strategy game where you teach your networks how to react to different inputs (flags, enemies, friends, etc.).

We'll then compete the teams against each other in a massive tournament.

Why not build a tournament around creating a useful product/analysis instead of winning a synthetic game?