CIG @ Politecnico di Milano

The 2011 Simulated Car Racing Championship will be the third Simulated Car Racing Championship. Following the path of the previous editions, also the 2011 Simulated Car Racing Championship will be an event joining more competitions held at major conferences in the field of Evolutionary Computation and in the field of Computational Intelligence and Games.
We are pleased to announce that this year, the 3 legs of the championship will be held at:

• EVO*-2011, Torino (Italy)
• ACM GECCO-2011, Dublin (Ireland)
• IEEE CIG-2011, Seoul (South Korea)

Goal

The goal of the championship is to design a controller for a racing car that will compete on a set of unknown tracks first alone (against the clock) and then against other drivers.
The controllers perceive the racing environment through a number of sensors that describe the relevant features of the car surroundings (e.g., the track limits, the position of near-by obstacles), of the car state (the fuel level, the engine RPMs, the current gear, etc.), and the current game state (lap time, number of lap, etc.). The controller can perform the typical driving actions (clutch, changing gear, accelerate, break, steering the wheel, etc.)

Backward Compatibility

The 2011 Championship will not introduce any major change with respect to the previous edition.
In particular, we will not introduce any change to the APIs, such that it will be possible to build a controller based on the entries of the past year.

Rules and Regulations

The championship consists of several races on different tracks divided into legs.
Teams will be allowed to submit a different driver to each leg.

Each Grand Prix consists of three stages:

• the warm-up
• the qualifying
• the race

During warm-up, each driver races alone.
Drivers can collect useful information about the tracks and can tune their behaviors for the next stages. Accordingly, the performance of drivers in this stage is not taken into account for their scores.

During the qualifying stage each driver races alone on each track of the leg.
The eight controllers that bridge the longest distances qualify for the actual Grand Prix races.

During the final races, these best eight drivers race together.
The races consist of eight runs on each of the three tracks. At the end of each race, the drivers are scored using the F1 system: 10 points to the first controller that completes the race, 8 points to the second one, 6 to the third one, 5 to the fourth, 4 to the fifth one, 3 to the sixth, 2 to the seventh, and 1 to the eighth. The driver performing the fastest lap in the race will get two additional points. The driver completing the race with the smallest amount of damage will also get two extra points. The starting grid of the first race will be based on the performance obtained in the qualifying stage. Each subsequent race, the starting grid will be shifted by one so that each driver starts from every position of the starting grid exactly once.

Submission

Send your controller per email with subject line [scr2011 entry] to the following address: scr2011@sigevolution.org
A valid submission would include:

• either a C++ or a Java controller compliant with the examples provided with the client (you should also include all the libraries or packages necessary to compile your controller);
• a brief README.txt with the instructions for compiling and launching your controller;
• 5 slides (plese provide a .ppt or .pptx presentation).

Please notice that you are not required to either attend or register to the conferences in order to enter the competition.

Important Dates

EVO* Leg

• Submission deadline: April 15, 2011
• Conference: April 27-29, 2011

GECCO Leg

• Submission deadline: July 1, 2011
• Conference: July 12-16, 2011

CIG Leg

• Submission deadline: August 19, 2011
• Conference: August 31-September 3, 2011

Competition Software

• Software manual
• Server for Linux
• Server for Windows
• C++ Client
• Java Client

Support

For inquiries send an email to scr2011@sigevolution.org or visit the Car Racing Google Group at

groups.google.com/group/racingcompetition

Organizing Committee

• Daniele Loiacono, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Luigi Cardamone, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Martin V. Butz, University of Würzburg, Germany
• Pier Luca Lanzi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy