Unity Technologies has partnered with the Google Cloud Platform to launch the Obstacle Tower Challenge, which aims to test the limits of artificial intelligence in games. Contestants will be able to win cash, travel vouchers, and Google Cloud Platform credits, valued at more than $100K. This game is built upon Unity’s Obstacle Tower, a newly released game-like environment intended for machine learning researchers that involves a combination of platform-style gameplay with puzzles and planning problems inside a tower setting with potentially endless floors. It will examine how machines operate in a variety of areas, including computer vision, locomotion skills, and high-level planning, through platform-style gameplay with puzzles and planning. Read more for a video and a link to sign up.
This challenge begins on Monday, February 11 and will run through Friday, May 24. During the entrant period, there are two pre-established contestant rounds: the first (Feb. 11 – Mar. 31) where all participants will have the opportunity to play up to Floor 25 of the Obstacle Tower and the second (Apr. 15 – May 24) that is the final, 100-floor round. Signup here.
Each of the Tower floors is procedurally-generated, which means an AI agent must not only be able to solve a single version of the Tower but any arbitrary version as well. In this way, we’re testing the generalization ability of agents, a key capability that has not often been analyzed by benchmarks in the past. Essentially, with the launch of the Obstacle Tower Challenge, we hope to stimulate new AI research and further the field of reinforcement learning,” said Danny Lange, Vice President of AI and Machine Learning, Unity Technologies.
