Dear all,
we have just updated the competition page.
In particular, we added to the Rules:
-
Competition structure The competition will be divided into two rounds.
- Round 1: During the first round, submissions will be evaluated by running only the extrinsic phase. Participants will have to pre-train their robot controllers on their machines before submission. Top 20 ranked participants whose submissions follow the spirit of the rules will be able to participate to Round 2 (see also Spirit of the Rules and Code inspection below).
- Round 2: during the second round, submissions will be evaluated by running both the intrinsic and extrinsic phase. All final submissions will be checked for coherence with the spirit of the rules.
-
Spirit of the rules As also explained above, the spirit of the rules is that during the intrinsic phase the robot is not explicitly given any task to learn and it does not know of the future extrinsic tasks, but it rather learns in a fully autonomous way.
As such, the Golden Rule is that it is explicitly forbidden to use the scoring function of the extrinsic phase or variants of it as a reward function to train the agent. Participants should give as little information as possible to the robot, rather the system should learn from scratch to interact with the objects using curiosity, intrinsic motivations, self-generated goals, etc.
However, given the difficulty of the competition and the many challenges that it contains and to encourage a wide participation, in Round 1 it will be possible to violate in part the aspects of the spirit of the competition, except the Golden Rule above. For example, it will be possible to use hardwired or pre-trained models for recognising the identity of objects and their position in space. All submissions, except those violating the Golden Rule, will be considered valid and ranked for Round 1. However, only submissions fully complying with the spirit of the rules will access Round 2 and take part to the final ranking.
We are still working on opening online submissions - it will take us a few more days still.
We have also extended “Beta” period up to 31st July, to allow some more feedback on the Rules and the Starting Kit.