In collaboration with prize sponsor Google Cloud Platform, the Obstacle Tower Challenge is a first-of-its-kind contest that will test one of the broadest sets of artificial intelligence capabilities to date

SAN FRANCISCO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — January 28, 2019 — Unity Technologies ( https://unity3d.com), creator of the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, today announced the upcoming launch of the Obstacle Tower Challenge: a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI) challenge designed to test the capabilities of intelligent agents and accelerate the research and development of AI. In collaboration with prize sponsor Google Cloud Platform, the Obstacle Tower Challenge will be a new benchmark aimed at testing the vision, control, planning, and generalization abilities of AI systems -- capabilities that no other benchmark has tested together before. Participants will have the opportunity to win prizes valued at over $100,000, in the form of cash, travel vouchers, and Google Cloud Platform credits.

The Obstacle Tower Challenge is built upon Unity’s Obstacle Tower, a newly released game-like environment intended for machine learning researchers. The Obstacle Tower environment involves a combination of platform-style gameplay with puzzles and planning problems inside a tower setting with potentially endless floors. The Challenge will examine how machines operate in a variety of areas, including computer vision, locomotion skills, and high-level planning, through platform-style gameplay with puzzles and planning problems.

“Each of the Tower floors is procedurally-generated, which means an AI agent must not only be able to solve a single version of the Tower but any arbitrary version as well. In this way, we’re testing the generalization ability of agents, a key capability that has not often been analyzed by benchmarks in the past,” said Danny Lange, Vice President of AI and Machine Learning, Unity Technologies. “Essentially, with the launch of the Obstacle Tower Challenge, we hope to stimulate new AI research and further the field of reinforcement learning.”

Obstacle Tower Challenge Details

The Challenge begins on Monday, February 11 and will run through Friday, May 24. During the entrant period, there are two pre-established contestant rounds:

• Round 1 (February 11 - March 31): All participants will have the opportunity to play up to Floor 25 of the Obstacle Tower in the first round.
• Round 2 (April 15 - May 24): Round 2 is the final, 100-floor round.
• Winners Announced (June 14)

For more information, please visit www.unity3d.com/OTC.

Unity exists to empower success of the world’s creators with the most accessible and powerful real-time 3D development and monetization platform. Unity’s ML-Agents toolkit established Unity as the platform of choice for the development of intelligent agents. The Unity engine can create the massive simulations needed by researchers to study autonomous artificial agents and develop new kinds of algorithms, which will accelerate fundamental AI research in areas including robotics, autonomous vehicle development, and many other areas of science and technology. For more information, please visit Unity3d.ai.

About Unity Technologies

Unity is the creator of the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, giving developers around the world the tools to create rich, interactive 2D, 3D, VR and AR experiences. The company’s 1,000 person development team keeps Unity at the bleeding-edge of technology by working alongside partners such as Google, Facebook, Magic Leap, Oculus and Microsoft to ensure optimized support for the latest releases and platforms. Games and experiences made with Unity have reached ~3 billion devices worldwide and were installed more than 28 billion times in the last 12 months. Unity’s renowned flexibility gives developers the power to target and optimize their creations for 25+ platforms including Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Gameroom (Facebook), SteamVR (PC & Mac), Oculus, PSVR, Gear VR, HoloLens, ARKit (Apple), ARCore (Google) and more. Unity also offers solutions and services for connecting with audiences including Unity Ads, Unity Analytics, Unity Asset Store, Unity Cloud Build, Unity Collaborate, Unity Connect and Unity Certification. For more information, visit www.unity3d.com and to see the latest games and experiences created in Unity, go to https://unity.com/madewith.

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Unity PR
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Marisa Graves
Unity PR
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