Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next. Regression Games has raised $4.2 million to bring the power of AI to gaming and esports competitions. But Aaron Vontell comes from a rare breed of technical experts in a fresh area of gaming. The Philadelphia startup is the brainchild Vontell, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped create Battlecode, an AI gaming competition for students. Battlecode was a big inspiration for the new company.

Below are three alternatives to Kaggle which I've become interested in: A fourth competition does exist -- HALITE by Two Sigma-- however, HALITE appears to have been discontinued…you're welcome to check it out on your own; only Battlecode, Terminal, and Lux are summarized below. Battle Code has been around since 2003; the description below is taken directly from the site. Battlecode is a real-time strategy game, for which you will write an AI player. Your AI player will need to strategically manage a robot army and control how your robots work together to defeat the enemy team. As a contestant, you will learn to use artificial intelligence, pathfinding, distributed algorithms, and communications to make your player as competitive as possible.

The final tournament was an hour away and defeat seemed imminent for Cory Li. His team's AI was one of the best in the 2012 Battlecode competition but it was too often outplayed by an algorithm created by an opponent named Tom Morgan. Luckily, Li's team saw a weakness in their nemesis. "His AI was vulnerable to a really aggressive attack," he told me. To win, Li would have to hack MIT's longest running coding competition, retrieve enemy intel, and listen in on their communications.