Every year there is a brand new reinforcement learning competition. This usually consists of new organizers, and a new website! Instead of replacing the old website every year and breaking hundreds of links, we use a different subdomain each year. So, this page will always exist at: http://rl-competition.org And the specific websites for different years are: NIPS Reinforcement Learning Workshop: Benchmarks and Bakeoffs NIPS Reinforcement Learning Workshop: Benchmarks and Bakeoffs II ICML Reinforcement Learning and Benchmarking Event NIPS Workshop: The First Annual Reinforcement Learning Competition The 2008 Reinforcement Learning Competition:: http://2008.rl-competition.org

This article reports on the 2008 Reinforcement Learning Competition,  which began in November 2007 and ended with a workshop at the  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in July 2008 in  Helsinki, Finland.  Researchers from around the world developed  reinforcement learning agents to compete in six problems of various  complexity and difficulty.  The competition employed fundamentally  redesigned evaluation frameworks that, unlike those in previous  competitions, aimed to systematically encourage the submission of  robust learning methods. We describe the unique challenges of  empirical evaluation in reinforcement learning and briefly review  the history of the previous competitions and the evaluation  frameworks they employed.  We also describe the novel frameworks  developed for the 2008 competition as well as the software  infrastructure on which they rely.  Furthermore, we describe the six  competition domains and present a summary of selected competition  results.  Finally, we discuss the implications of these results and  outline ideas for the future of the competition.