Main Description

AIC Internal Competition: Reinforcement Learning Series
Level up your RL skills in a friendly, hands-on competition hosted by the AI Community at SBU (AIC). Across three themed workshops you’ll learn core and advanced RL techniques—then train agents to play Mario, solve a Rubik’s Cube, master Snake, and race a car. Learn by doing, compete for bragging rights, and win prizes.

Why it’s special

  • Bite-size workshops with clear take-home code and notebooks

  • Progressive challenges (intro → advanced) with mentors on site

  • Judged on agent performance, reproducibility, and explanation—not just compute

  • Open to all skill levels; come to any round and catch up with the starter kits

Prize pool: $200 total for top overall performers across the series (not round-by-round).

Schedule (all 12:30–1:50 PM)

  • Round 1 — Intro to RL: Mario & Rubik’s Cube — Oct 15, Frey 205

  • Round 2 — Advanced RL: Snake — Oct 27, SAC 302 (free pizza)

  • Round 3 — Advanced RL: Car Racing — Nov 5, Frey 205

  • Final Showcase & Awards: TBA (announced in Discord/@everyone)

Come for the learning, stay for the leaderboard. You don’t need to have attended earlier rounds to join later ones.

Requirements

Submit one project on Devpost per team with:

  1. Notebook (.ipynb) containing your final training/evaluation code (with readable sections and comments).

  2. Output clip (GIF or MP4, ≤30s) clearly showing successful completion of the target task/episode (e.g., level clear, cube solved, lap complete).

  3. README.md with:

    • Environment(s) used and version (e.g., Gymnasium/Retro, CarRacing-v2)

    • Algorithm & key design choices (e.g., PPO with reward shaping)

    • Training time & hardware used

    • Repro steps (exact command/cell order)

  4. Results: final score/metric (e.g., episode reward, completion time) and a screenshot of your score/seed if applicable.

Eligibility note: To be eligible for prizes, your video must show task completion and your notebook must reproduce the result without manual intervention beyond launching cells.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

1 non-cash prize
Announced in AIC Discord
3 winners

Prizes for 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place!

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Ruthvick Bandaru

Ruthvick Bandaru
President

Karamat Hasan

Anjan Athreya

Judging Criteria

  • In the main page
    Rubric is described in the main page

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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