[DMANET] Competition on Dynamic Stacking Optimization in Uncertain Environments @ GECCO 2020

COMPETITION ON DYNAMIC STACKING OPTIMIZATION IN UNCERTAIN ENVIRONMENTS

to be held as part of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2020) organized by ACM SIGEVO (https://gecco-2020.sigevo.org).

Competition webpage: https://dynstack2020.adaptop.at

In this competition we give you a server where you can delve into mysterious worlds of blocks and stacks. The hero in this world is a robotic crane that is fearlessly stacking and delivering blocks. Did you ever wish to control a robot solving a herculean task? Well, now is your chance! Granted, our crane is not as cute as, for instance WALL-E, but it wants to do a similar good job and therefore relies on YOUR optimization skills! It waits for you to tell it which blocks to pick up and where to drop them off so that the continuing stream of incoming blocks is dealt with most effortlessly.

A 15 minutes getting started tutorial is available on the competition webpage which shows how you can run a (pretty bad) sample policy. This is implemented in three different languages: Python, C#, and Rust. However, you can use any other programming language that you like! The basic requirements is that you have an implementation of ZeroMQ and Protobuf. We aimed to make the topic of optimization in dynamic or uncertain environments as easy to approach as possible and yet create a challenging and also rewarding experience.

This competition is hosted by Andreas Beham, Stefan Wagner, Sebastian Raggl, and Johannes Karder at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria (https://fh-ooe.at/en) Hagenberg Campus within the research project Josef Ressel Center for Adaptive Optimization in Dynamic Environments (https://adaptop.at) led by Stefan Wagner and funded by the Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft (https://www.cdg.ac.at/en). If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact us at mailto:dynstack2020@adaptop.at!

You can also publish a 2-page summary of your contributions in the Companion Materials of the Proceedings of ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2020). Deadline for these 2-page summaries is April 3rd. Instructions are given [*], however, only 2 pages are allowed. Submission to the GECCO proceedings is not needed to participate in the competition, nor is it required to attend GECCO. The announcement of the winner will be made during GECCO 2020.

We hope that you will have fun participating in this challenge! The deadline is Sunday June, 21 2020 (anywhere in the world). For more information please visit our webpage https://dynstack2020.adaptop.at

[*]:  https://gecco-2020.sigevo.org/index.html/Workshops




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