IlliGAL Blogging

John Koza and Third Millennium Online Products, Inc. announce a competition for human-competitive results produced by genetic and evolutionary computation. The deadline for the competition is 20 June 2005 and the announcement may be seen here. According to the competition, a result may be considered human-competitive if it satisfies one of 8 criteria:

1. The result was patented as an invention in the past, is an improvement over a patented invention, or would qualify today as a patentable new invention.
2. The result is equal to or better than a result that was accepted as a new scientific result at the time when it was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
3. The result is equal to or better than a result that was placed into a database or archive of results maintained by an internationally recognized panel of scientific experts.
4. The result is publishable in its own right as a new scientific result ¾ independent of the fact that the result was mechanically created.
5. The result is equal to or better than the most recent human-created solution to a long-standing problem for which there has been a succession of increasingly better human-created solutions.
6. The result is equal to or better than a result that was considered an achievement in its field at the time it was first discovered.
7. The result solves a problem of indisputable difficulty in its field.
8. The result holds its own or wins a regulated competition involving human contestants (in the form of either live human players or human-written computer programs).

The inaugural competition in 2004 awarded $5000 in prize money among six medalists.

In the interest of full disclosure, the writer of this post was a contest judge in 2004 and will serve in that capacity again this year.