The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, is chairing a reconnaissance blind chess (RBC) competition as part of the 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019), one of the top machine learning conferences in the world.

All are welcome to participate in the artificial intelligence (AI) competition, which starts Oct. 21. Participants do not need to attend the NeurIPS conference and there is no cost to participate. The winner receives a $1,000 prize and participants can play the game now.

To participate or experiment, obtain the RBC game and simple example bots by following APL’s Python package documentation, which is available at https://reconchess.readthedocs.io/en/latest). Participants interested in writing a bot in a language other than Python, or who prefer a lower level of control, can obtain HTTP RESTful API to interact with the competition server, and the Python implementation of a client can be used as a reference.

Participants need to register by Aug. 6 at https://rbc.jhuapl.edu/register. Two test tournaments will be held on Aug. 13 and Sept. 19 to check the infrastructure to ensure a smooth competition. The final tournament begins Oct. 21 with the outcome presented during the competition workshop at NeurIPS 2019.