We are happy to announce the Generative Design in Minecraft Competition (GDMC). We are currently running our first challenge, the settlement generation competition.
Do you like Minecraft and procedural content generation? Did you look at the villages in Minecraft and thought, I could write a better algorithm to produce settlements? Now is your chance to prove it.
The Settlement Generation Challenge is about writing an algorithm that can create a settlement for a given, unknown Minecraft map. The challenge is to produce an algorithm that is adaptive towards the provided map, creates a settlement that satisfies a range of  functional requirement - but also looks good and evokes an interesting narrative. The goal is to basically produce an algorithm that can rival the state of the art of what humans can produce.
If you are interested in participating, you can find a framework and example agents on our GitHub [ https://github.com/mcgreentn/GDMC ] page. Rules and detailed judging criteria can be found on our webpage [ http://gendesignmc.engineering.nyu.edu/ ]. The basic idea is that all submitted algorithms will be run on three, previously unseen, maps, and the results will then be evaluated by our advisory board. So, grab one of our test maps (http://gendesignmc.engineering.nyu.edu/files/TestMaps.zip), and see what you can do.
The submission deadline is the 30th of June, and results will be announced at the Foundations of Digital Games conference (FDG 2018) in August , as well as online. Submissions will open soon.
You can find more info on our website at http://gendesignmc.engineering.nyu.edu/ or read the scientific paper we wrote about it https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09853.
Also, follow us on Twitter (@GenDesignMC) for updates and announcements, or join our discord channel: http://discord.gg/ueaxuXj
The GDMC organization team
This shows you how often I check my mail, because the first Settlement Generation Challenge had the results announced…in summer 2018.
But if you want to participate, the second challenge recently had a deadline extension: entries are due April 14th.