Challenges For AI

The people over at the UMBC eBiquity Blog give a nice description of the new Hutter Prize and took the opportunity to give an overview of other CS/AI prizes such as the Grand Challenge or the Loebner prize. They do however, miss two of the most interesting ones:

The first is the race of robotic cars up Pikes Peak, I wrote about it here

Even more interesting - at least from the viewpoint of symbolic AI - is the General Game Playing Competition.

A General Game Playing System is one that can accept a formal description of an arbitrary game and, without further human interaction, can play the game effectively.

General Game Playing systems are characterized by their use of general cognitive information processing technologies (such as knowledge representation, reasoning, learning, and rational behavior). Unlike specialized game playing systems (such as Deep Blue), they do not rely exclusively on algorithms designed in advance for specific games.