1. To prevent people from gaining an unfair competitive advantage, anyone who helped prepare the competition software cannot compete in any domains they directly worked on.  Please consult the list of who can't compete.
   
   
2. Each participant in the competition should be a member of no more than one team.
   
   
3. All substantial contributors to a team should be registered with that team.
   
   
4. All participating teams must be registered via the Signup Page and all results must be submitted by 11:59PM GMT on July 1st, 2008.
    
   
5. First, second, and third place certificates will be award to the top scoring teams in each event, based on their performance in the test runs only.  See the Evaluation Page for more details about the difference between training, proving, and test runs.
   
   
6. The organizers reserve the right to request source code for review (confidentially) and/or a supervised reproduction of competition results.
   
   
7. The organizers reserve the right to disqualify any team at their sole discretion of they deem that team to have gained an unfair advantage with unsportsmanlike intent.
   
   
8. Some information has been hidden from the participants by the organizers: things like the exact problem dynamics, variations in generalized domains, parameter distributions, etc.  It is considered cheating to directly subvert our attempts, for example: decompiling jar files, archiving proving or test MDPs for unsanctioned training, trying to find security holes in the current (or previous) versions of the software, etc.
   
   It is not considered cheating to use other resources that are not related to the condition that are available to you: expert domain knowledge, reference domain implementations available on the Internet, previous results and algorithms from the literature, etc.  Please, just don't misuse the stuff that we gave you.  If you want to do something, and you feel it's a real grey area, please e-mail us.  Added Dec 13, 2007.

Please remember that the RL competition is an academic event and is conducted in the spirit of scientific progress.  While we strive to be as clear as possible about the rules, all teams are expected to abide by the spirit of these rules, not just the letter.  If there is any doubt about what is permissable, particpants should check in advance with the organizers.  If doing so might compromise the team's strategy, the organizers can answer confidentially.

 

Please consider this to be a living document.  We are not lawyers, and may choose to adapt or modify these rules if it becomes necessary.