Georgy Cheremovskiy writes:

I’m one of the organizers of an unusual reinforcement learning competition named Black Box Challenge.

The conception is simple — one need to program an agent that can play a game with unknown rules. At each time step agent is given an environment state vector and has a few possible actions. The rewards may be delayed and have stochastic nature — the same actions can lead to different rewards.

The competition is created with support of Mail.ru (one of the largest Russian Internet companies) and Data-Centric Alliance (DCA is a Russian company specialising on big data and high-load systems), and the winners will be rewarded with pleasant prizes:
$4400 (300,000 rubles) — for the 1st place
$2550 (175,000 rubles) — for the 2nd place
$1820 (125,000 rubles) — for the 3rd place
Microsoft Xbox One — for the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th places

I have no idea what this is but I thought I’d post it, because—hey, that’s a lot of rubles!

Perhaps Richard Tol can enter, once he’s through winning the $100,000 global warming time-series challenge.