Building on last year's competition and the benchmarking events that preceded it, this event will be a forum for reinforcement learning researchers to rigorously compare the performance of their methods on a suite of challenging domains. The competition finals and workshop will take place during the Multidisciplinary Symposium on Reinforcement Learning, a part of the 2009 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'09) in Montreal, Canada. To encourage student participation, we will be awarding travel scholarships for student competitors.

In order to encourage even greater participation, our technical committee has been working hard to lower the bar for entry. The competition software is easy to install, and contains sample code so that you can get started with minimal effort. In addition to travel scholarships there are a number of exciting prizes for grabs. We are also including resources to make it easy for instructors to use the competition software as a part of a course on Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning, or Artificial Intelligence.

http://2009.rl-competition.org/index.php