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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">We invite participants to compete in the first <span style="color:#212529">Maritime Capture the Flag (MCTF) Competition at AAMAS 2024. The competition involves programming
a team of agents via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) 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:
</span></span><a href="https://sites.google.com/view/mctf2024"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">https://sites.google.com/view/mctf2024</span></a><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">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 a team of two agents to play a 2-v-2 MCTF game on the competition Website.</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Questions: mctf2024-at-gmail-dot-com</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Slack channel (for help, discussions, Q&A, known issues, etc): </span><a href="https://maritimecaptu-8dc6606.slack.com/"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">https://maritimecaptu-8dc6606.slack.com</span></a><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">================</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Competition Problem</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">================</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212121">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 at AAMAS 2024 is to program </span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">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 gaming environment. Submissions will be evaluated against three difficulty levels of opponent teams
provided by the competition organizers during the qualifying rounds. During the final round, top performing submission entries from the qualifying rounds will play a round robin competition against each other. Competition winners will be announced at the MCTF
competition meeting at AAMAS.</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Timeline:</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">=======</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Competition Website live: February 5, 2024</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Qualifying Rounds (online): February 5 - April 5, 2024</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Notification to Finalists: April 8, 2024</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Final Round (online): April 22-26, 2024</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Winner Announcements and half-day meeting: May 6-10, 2024 (located at AAMAS in Auckland, NZ; exact day to be finalized)</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Organizers:</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">=========</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">John Kliem, U. S. Naval Research Laboratory (main POC)</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Prithviraj (Raj) Dasgupta, U. S. Naval Research Laboratory</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Michael (Misha) Novitzky, U. S. Military Academy, West Point</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Michael Benjamin, MIT</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Zachary Serlin, MIT Lincoln Laboratory</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Edward Pottrill, Defence Science & Technology Lab (DSTL), UK</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">David Hubczenko, Defence Science & Technology Group (DSTG), Australia</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#212529">Jordan Beason, U. S. Military Academy, West Point</span><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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