tl;dr The competition launch date has been moved back to June 8thth. Baselines will be released on June 27th.
Competition Timeline Update
Hey everyone! First off, we can’t express how excited we are for the competition. There has been a great deal amount of interest (310+ sign ups!), and we’re excited to kick things off in the next couple of days. We’re busy working hard on a code-base that will make the development of agents simple and efficient, but it looks like we’ll need a few more days to get the basic framework published for everyone to use. Therefore, we’ve decided to move the launch date of the competition to June 5th.
Between June 5th and June 27th, the released framework and competition materials will be in an open beta, so expect a few bugs. We’ll be working diligently to answer any questions and fix any issues that may arise during that period so that by the 27th, a fully fledged version of the environment and datapipeline can be bug free. Although the environment will be in beta, you can still begin working on your algorithms and approaches and submit them as normal to the AIcrowd website. All of the details on how to do so will be released on June 5th so look forward to that!
Also on June 27th our partners at preferred networks will be releasing a set of baseline reinforcement learning and imitation learning baselines implemented in Chainer for everyone to play with (of course your algorithms can be written in any framework)! More details on that to come.
Other Updates
We’ve been receiving a lot of questions with respect to team formation, environment sample limitations, and various other aspects of the competition. To that end we’re going to be creating an FAQ document with all of these questions and their answers. We’ll further be using this form as our primary form of communciation and mechanism through which we can answer questions, so feel free to start posting here.
In the coming weeks, we will also launch a discord server where you can continuously interact with the organizers and other participants as the competition proceeds. Again, we’ll post that here in the forms.
Thank you all for your patience! If you have any questions please feel free to reply below 
Good luck!
Will
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in the other thread it was said till the team feature is available, individual members can sign up on their own accounts and this can be merged later - just would like to double check, is there a rule etc that all the team members need to be signed up before the start date? or is it fine to sign up individually at some point over round 1 or for them to be signed up to the team when that feature is available?
Hey vihanga,
Sign-ups will continue to be open through round 1 of the competition. The AICrowd count-down is simply a way of denoting when the competition will be released.
We may close sign-ups a week or so before the end of round 1 to prevent a flood of last minute submissions, however additional participants are more than welcome to sign up after the competition is underway!
Hi all,
Internally we have found some issues that prevented the release of all of the starter materials today.
To avoid confusion we have decided to postpone the launch until Saturday June 8th.
We will update participants here with any changes.
Thank you for your continued patience, we can not wait for you to get started either =)
You might want to release a statement on the blog on the competition website as well. I know people will look there too.
In case anyone has followed this thread - the competition is now launched! We can’t wait for everyone to get started!
Are the Baselines released yet? If yes, can someone please provide a link for the same? Thanks!
Hi @arpit_gang! Welcome to the community
We will be releasing all of this on Thursday!
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Hi Brandon,
I registered for the competition at the end of May, found today that my account information is showing that “[my id] hasn’t entered any challenges yet…”. This is not just me, but several of my friend also experienced the same problem.
You wrote that participation will continue to be open, but I cannot find the participate button any more. I believe that I am not the only one that experienced the same problem. Is there going to be a way to re-enroll for the competition?
Thank you so much.
@mohanty could you take a look at this?
@jazzpiano3 : If you are referring to this page : https://www.aicrowd.com/participants/petros_christodoulou
Then, you are right, the message is misleading. The MineRL challenge will show up there as soon as you make a single submission to the competition. But your account has been registered for the competition (and hence the Participate button doesnt show up)
Cheers,
Mohanty
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