[agents] FIRST CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Maritime Capture the Flag (MCTF) Competition at AAMAS 2025

[Dasgupta, Prithviraj CIV USN NRL WASHINGTON DC (USA)]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Maritime Capture the Flag (MCTF) Competition at AAMAS 2025



We are pleased to announce the 2nd Maritime Capture the Flag (MCTF) Competition at AAMAS 2025, in Detroit, MI.



The competition involves programming a team of agents via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) or other techniques to play a Capture-the-Flag game. Brief information about the competition problem is given below; detailed information is available on the competition Website at: https://mctf2025.com<https://mctf2025.com.>.



Competition Problem

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Capture the Flag is a commonly played team-game involving two opposing teams. Each team's objective is to capture the opponent's flag, while preventing the opponent from capturing the team's flag. We consider a Maritime Capture-the-Flag (MCTF) game where the players are autonomous marine vehicles. The objective of the MCTF competition is to program three agents that can play the MCTF game as a team against a 3-player opponent team, while maximizing their team's score, within a real-time simulation of a maritime game environment. Top performing entries from simulation will be deployed on autonomous surface vehicles to play the game in a physical maritime environment while competing against each other.



To help participants familiarize with the programming, we have included a brief tutorial and sample code written in Python and RLlib for training and evaluating agents to play a 3-v-3 MCTF game on the competition Website.



Evaluation: During the qualifying round, each submitted competition entry will be automatically evaluated in simulation against the top-10 teams on the current leaderboard, immediately following submission. The leaderboard will be updated to reflect the score-based ranking of teams. At the end of the qualifying round period, the top 10 scoring teams in simulation will move on to hardware competition phase. Each qualifying entry will be evaluated on autonomous surface vehicles playing a 3-v-3 MCTF game against each of the other qualifying entries, within a physical marine MCTF environment at West Point, NY. Competition winners will be announced at the MCTF competition meeting at AAMAS. Details of the scoring rules and leaderboard ranking are available on the competition Website.



For participation/attendance requirements for competition finalists at AAMAS 2025, please see the MCTF Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section at https://mctf2025.com/faq.



Timeline:

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Qualifying Rounds (online): February 24 - May 4, 2025

Final Submissions Due (online): May 4, 2025

Hardware competitions (West Point, NY): May 5-16, 2025 (Not open for attendance to competition entrants)

Winner Announcements and half-day meeting (at AAMAS 2025 in Detroit, MI, USA): May 19-20, 2025; exact date will be finalized in late April.



Questions: john.kliem3.civ at us.navy.mil<mailto:john.kliem3.civ at us.navy.mil>



Organizers:

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John Kliem, Naval Research Laboratory, USA (main POC)

Prithviraj (Raj) Dasgupta, Naval Research Laboratory, USA

Michael (Misha) Novitzky, U. S. Military Academy, West Point, USA

Michael Benjamin, MIT

Zachary Serlin, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Edward Pottrill, Defence Science & Technology Lab (DSTL), UK

David Hubczenko, Defence Science & Technology Group (DSTG), Australia

Jordan Beason, U. S. Military Academy, West Point, USA

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Dr. Prithviraj (Raj) Dasgupta

Distributed Intelligent Systems Section (Code 5583)
Information & Decision Sciences (IDS) Branch
Information Technology Division
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC

Web: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prithviraj-raj-dasgupta-9122a5/
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