Call for Participlation: 2016

[Kevin Waugh]

The Annual Computer Poker Competition will be held again in 2016, during the month of January.  Kevin Waugh will be returning the competition chair.  As in previous years there will be a heads-up (two player) no-limit Texas Hold'em competition and a three-player Kuhn competition.  

The status of the two-player limit and three-player limit Texas Hold’em events is not yet finalized.  The steering committee feels that these events have stagnated and are failing to meet their scientific goals.  We anticipate altering, or replacing these two competitions in future years.  This year, we will hold these two events given sufficient interest (i.e., 6 or more teams).  Any individuals or teams who wish to partake in either the two-player limit or three-player limit events will need to send an email by October 1 to ch...@computerpokercompetition.org expressing their interest.  We will announce the status of these two events at that time. 

The current plan is to use Amazon EC2 instances again this year, with a final submission deadline of January 4.  Note that these machines are quite a bit less powerful than many desktop machines, so if computing resources are a significant issue for you, please check that this is adequate.  We have not yet finalized the hardware and storage limitations for this year.  We anticipate increasing the storage limit and migrating to the newer EC2 generation.  We will announce the final hardware specifications on October 2.  See (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) for details on Amazon instance types. It is possible to get access to a smaller testing instance through Amazon for free by creating an EC2 account, and all competitors will get access to a full sized competition machine for final testing at least one week prior to the final submission deadline.

Any individuals or teams that wish to participate will need to send an email by December 1 to ch...@computerpokercompetition.org expressing their interest.  We would like to know which competition events you are interested in entering, and if you have participated in the past.  If you require any special software - anything that is not installed by default on an Amazon EC2 instance - you must let us know by December 1, so we can try to make sure your requirements are met.  Your expression of interest email is not a formal commitment, but lets us plan for the time and resources required to run the competition.

 - Kevin