General machine intelligence

The Machine Intelligence Prize is awarded annually by the British Computer Society

British Computer Society

The British Computer Society, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally...

 for progress towards machine intelligence.

The David E. Rumelhart prize

Rumelhart Prize

The David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition was founded in 2001 in honor of the celebrated cognitive scientist David Rumelhart. The annual award is presented at the Cognitive Science Society meeting, where the recipient gives a lecture and...

 is an annual award for making a "significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition". The prize is $100,000.

The Human-Competitive Award is an annual challenge started in 2004 to reward results "competitive with the work of creative and inventive humans". The prize is $10,000. Entries are required to use evolutionary computing.

The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence

IJCAI Award for Research Excellence

The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is a biannual award given at the IJCAI conference to researcher in artificial intelligence as a recognition of excellence of their career...

 is a biannual award given at the IJCAI conference to researcher in artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 as a recognition of excellence

Excellence

Excellence is a talent or quality which is unusually good and so surpasses ordinary standards. It is also an aimed for standard of performance.-History:...

 of their career.

Conversational behaviour

The Loebner prize

Loebner prize

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations...

 is an annual competition to determine the best Turing test

Turing test

The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...

 competitors. The winner is the computer system that, in the judges' opinions, demonstrates the "most human" conversational behaviour (with learning AI Ultra Hal winning in 2007, Jabberwacky

Jabberwacky

Jabberwacky is a chatterbot created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter. Its stated aim is to "simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner"...

 in 2005 and 2006, and A.L.I.C.E.

Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity

A.L.I.C.E. , also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input, and in its online form it also relies on a hidden third person...

 before that), they have an additional prize for a system that in their opinion passes a Turing test. This second prize has not yet been awarded.

Pilotless aircraft

The International Aerial Robotics Competition

International Aerial Robotics Competition

The International Aerial Robotics Competition began in 1991 on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the longest running university-based robotics competition in the world...

 is a long-running event begun in 1991 to advance the state of the art in fully autonomous air vehicles. This competition is restricted to university teams (although industry and governmental sponsorship of teams is allowed). Key to this event is the creation of flying robots which must complete complex missions without any human intervention. Successful entries are able to interpret their environment and make real-time decisions based only on a high-level mission directive (e.g., "find a particular target inside a building having certain characteristics which is among a group of buildings 3 kilometers from the aerial robot launch point"). In 2000, a $30,000 prize was awarded during the 3rd Mission (search and rescue), and in 2008, $80,000 in prize money was awarded at the conclusion of the 4th Mission (urban reconnaissance).

Driverless cars

The DARPA Grand Challenge

DARPA Grand Challenge

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for driverless vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense...

 is a series of competitions to promote driverless car

Driverless car

An autonomous car, also known as robotic or informally as driverless, is an autonomous vehicle capable of fulfilling the human transportation capabilities of a traditional car. As an autonomous vehicle, it is capable of sensing its environment and navigating on its own...

 technology, aimed at a congressional mandate stating that by 2015 one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the US Armed Forces should be unmanned. While the first race had no winner, the second awarded a $2 million prize for the autonomous navigation of a hundred mile trail, using GPS, computers and a sophisticated array of sensors. In November 2007, DARPA introduced the DARPA Urban Challenge, a sixty-mile urban area race.

Data-mining and prediction

The Netflix Prize

Netflix Prize

The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings....

 was a competition for the best collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, data sources, etc. Applications of collaborative filtering typically involve very large data sets...

 algorithm

Algorithm

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...

 that predicts user ratings for film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

s, based on previous ratings. The competition was held by Netflix

Netflix

Netflix, Inc., is an American provider of on-demand internet streaming media in the United States, Canada, and Latin America and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California...

, an online DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

-rental service. The prize was $1,000,000.

The Pittsburgh Brain Activity Interpretation Competition will reward analysis of fMRI data "to predict what individuals perceive and how they act and feel in a novel Virtual Reality world involving searching for and collecting objects, interpreting changing instructions, and avoiding a threatening dog." The prize in 2007 was $22,000.

The Face Recognition Grand Challenge (May 2004 to March 2006) aimed to promote and advance face recognition technology.

The American Meteorological Society

American Meteorological Society

The American Meteorological Society promotes the development and dissemination of information and education on the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications. Founded in 1919, the American Meteorological Society has a membership...

's artificial intelligence competition involves learning a classifier to characterise precipitation based on meteorological analyses of environmental conditions and polarimetric radar data.

Robot soccer

The RoboCup

RoboCup

RoboCup is an international robotics competition founded in 1997. The aim is to develop autonomous soccer robots with the intention of promoting research and education in the field of artificial intelligence...

 and FIRA

Federation of International Robot-soccer Association

or FIRA for short is an international organisation organising competitive soccer - usually 5-a-side - competitions between autonomous robots.FIRA was founded in 1997....

 are annual international robot soccer competitions. The International RoboCup Federation challenge is by 2050 "a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."

Logic, reasoning and knowledge representation

The Herbrand Award

Herbrand Award

The Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Deduction is an award given by CADE Inc. to honour persons or groups for important contributions to the field of automated deduction. The award is named after the French scientist Jacques Herbrand and given at most once per CADE or...

 is a prize given by CADE

Conference on Automated Deduction

The Conference on Automated Deduction is the premier academic conference on automated deduction and related fields. The first CADE was organized in 1974 at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Most CADE meetings have been held in Europe and the USA. However, conferences have been held all...

 Inc. to honour persons or groups for important contributions to the field of automated deduction

Automated theorem proving

Automated theorem proving or automated deduction, currently the most well-developed subfield of automated reasoning , is the proving of mathematical theorems by a computer program.- Decidability of the problem :...

. The prize is $1000.

The SUMO prize is an annual prize for the best open source ontology extension of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO)

Suggested Upper Merged Ontology

The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems. It was originally developed by the Teknowledge Corporation and now is maintained by . It is one candidate for the "standard upper ontology"...

, a formal theory of terms and logical definitions describing the world. The prize is $3000.

The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge

Hutter Prize

The Hutter Prize is a cash prize funded by Marcus Hutter which rewards data compression improvements on a specific 100 MB English text file. Specifically, the prize awards 500 euros for each one percent improvement in the compressed size of the file enwik8, which is the smaller of two files used...

 is a cash prize which rewards compression improvements on a specific 100 MB English text file. The prize awards 500 euros for each one percent improvement. The organizers believe that text compression and AI are equivalent problems.

The Cyc TPTP Challenge is a competition to develop reasoning methods for the Cyc

Cyc

Cyc is an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning....

 comprehensive ontology and database of everyday common sense knowledge. The prize is 100 euros for "each winner of two related challenges".

The Eternity II challenge was a constraint satisfaction

Constraint satisfaction

In artificial intelligence and operations research, constraint satisfaction is the process of finding a solution to a set of constraints that impose conditions that the variables must satisfy. A solution is therefore a vector of variables that satisfies all constraints.The techniques used in...

 problem very similar to the Tetravex

TetraVex

TetraVex is a puzzle computer game, available for Windows and Linux systems.- Gameplay :TetraVex is an edge-matching puzzle. The player is presented with a grid and nine square tiles, each with a number on each edge. The objective of the game is to place the tiles in the grid in the proper...

 game. The objective is to lay 256 tiles on a 16x16 grid while satisfying a number of constraints. The problem is known to be NP-complete

NP-complete

In computational complexity theory, the complexity class NP-complete is a class of decision problems. A decision problem L is NP-complete if it is in the set of NP problems so that any given solution to the decision problem can be verified in polynomial time, and also in the set of NP-hard...

. The prize was US$ 2,000,000. The competition ended in December 2010.

Games

The AAAI General Game Playing Competition is a competition to develop programs that are effective at general game playing

General Game Playing

General Game Playing is the design of artificial intelligence programs to be able to play more than one game successfully. For many games like chess, computers are programmed to play these games using a specially designed algorithm, which cannot be transferred to another context. For example, a...

. Given a definition of a game, the program must play it effectively without human intervention. Since the game is not known in advance the competitors cannot especially adapt their programs to a particular scenario. The prize in 2006 and 2007 was $10,000.

The 2007 Ultimate Computer Chess Challenge was a competition organised by World Chess Federation that pitted
Deep Fritz against Deep Junior

Deep Junior

Junior is a computer chess program authored by the Israeli programmers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky. Grandmaster Boris Alterman assisted, in particular with the opening book...

. The prize was $100,000.

The annual Arimaa

Arimaa

The objective of the game is to move a rabbit of one's own color onto the home rank of the opponent. Thus Gold wins by moving a gold rabbit to the eighth rank, and Silver wins by moving a silver rabbit to the first rank...

 challenge offers a $10,000 prize until the year 2020 to develop a program that plays the board game Arimaa

Arimaa

The objective of the game is to move a rabbit of one's own color onto the home rank of the opponent. Thus Gold wins by moving a gold rabbit to the eighth rank, and Silver wins by moving a silver rabbit to the first rank...

 and defeats a group of selected human opponents.

2K Australia is offering a prize worth AU$10,000 to develop a game-playing bot that plays a first-person shooter

First-person shooter

First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

. The aim is to convince a panel of judges that it is actually a human player.

The Google AI Challenge is an bi-annual online contest organized by the University of Waterloo

University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is a comprehensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles, and has since grown to an institution of more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff...

 Computer Science Club and sponsored by Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

. Each year a game is chosen and contestants submit specialized automated bots

Computer game bot

A bot, most prominently in the first-person shooter types , is a type of weak AI expert system software which for each instance of the program controls a player in deathmatch, team deathmatch and/or cooperative human player. Computer bots may play against other bots and/or human players in unison,...

to play against other competing bots.