The IEEE CEC 2007 car racing competition

Finally, we've got the CEC version of the car racing competition up and running. Feel free to participate! Indeed, please participate! We're very eager to have as many participants as possible, using as different approaches as possible to how to develop their controllers. It's OK if you don't win - at least, it's OK for me...

I quote from the mail I just sent out to the CIG mailing last:

The competition is an incrementally evolved version of the competition
run for the Computational Intelligence and Games Symposium in April.
If you participated in that competition, you will be able to adapt
your submission to the new format with minimum effort. Even if you
have never heard of the competition before, the software is designed
to be as easy as possible to get started with.

Some main changes when compared to the CIG version of the conference are:

* A prize of 500 US Dollars is awarded to the winner. This is subject
to the winner being a registered attendant at CEC, and to at least 5
of the competitors registering for CEC.

* The software package and API have been extended to better
accommodate value function based control, and the software comes
complete with examples of temporal difference learners and genetic
programming controllers as well as various types of neural networks
and evolutionary algorithms.

* The submission format has changed in order to make sure that any
competitor (as well as the organizers) can easily download and run any
other competitor's submission.

Apart from that, various bug fixes have been made, and the competition
score method has changed slightly.