The Reinforcement Learning Competitions

Abstract

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.