An unusual Statistical (machine) learning theory challenge

[Martin Akolo Chiteri]

Thought I should share this here: http://www.blackboxchallenge.com/ 

Deadline is at the end of the month. Some cash and XBox ones go to the winners. 

Martin.

[Martin Akolo Chiteri]

For those interested, the challenge involves a lot of Reinforcement Learning. The requirement is to program an agent that plays a game whose rules are unknown to it. An example is shown in this video of bots getting trained to play old Atari games they have no prior knowledge of with their only objective being the maximization of their score in each game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqXKQf2BOSE 

Found some nice video lecture series on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0&index=1&list=PL5X3mDkKaJrL42i_jhE4N-p6E2Ol62Ofa 

There is a book on the same opon which the lectures are based on: https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html 

The above material could be quite useful even outside the Blackbox challenge itself.

Martin.