In principle, running a competition of solvers is easy: one just needs to collect solvers and benchmarks, run the experiments and publish the results. In practice, there are a number of issues that must be dealt with. This paper attempts to summarize the experience accumulated during the organization of several competitions: pseudo-Boolean, SAT and CSP/MaxCSP competitions.

Microbial communities are typically incredibly diverse, with many species contributing to the overall function of the community. The structure of these communities is the result of many complex biotic and abiotic factors. In this thesis, my colleagues and I employ a bottom-up approach to investigate the role of interspecies interactions in determining the structure of multispecies communities. ...

Coursebooks discussing graph algorithms usually have a chapter on minimum spanning trees. It usually contains Prim’s and Kruskal’s algorithms [1, 2] but often lacks other applications. This type of problem is rarely present at informatics competitions or in tests in secondary or higher level informatics education This article is aimed at describing some competition tasks that help us prove that...

Gamification represents an effective way to incentivize user behavior across a number of computing applications. However, despite the fact that physical activity is essential for a healthy lifestyle, surprisingly little is known about how gamification and in particular competitions shape human physical activity. Here we study how competitions affect physical activity. We focus on walking challe...

diversity of AI activities is manifested not only by papers and articles reflecting different projects and perspectives, but also in direct interactions between members of the AI community in conferences, workshops, exhibitions, and competitions. This issue of AI Magazine showcases the diversity of AI activities by accompanying its articles with an extensive set of reports on conferences and wo...