These are the rules of the game
- Each participant must have a unique alias.
- No participant can submit more than 2 entries in a 24 hour interval. Additional entries will be automatically ignored.
- After the end of the competition and before announcing the winners, the authors are required to provide a brief description of their solution to the organisers (1–2 pages). Failure to do so in the agreed upon time frame will lead to their disqualification.
- The organisers will use the provided code, models and solutions only for the purposes of checking whether the contest rules (5) & (6) are not broken. The organisers will not use any result without the authors’ permission.
- Participants must not use TauREx 3 or similar atmospheric retrieval codes to retrieve the test-set forward models. This would be considered test-set leakage and against the spirit of the competition.
- Participants must not have access to the ground truth before the competition’s closing date. If they do, they will be disqualified.
- For an entry to count as a winning entry, it must not rely heavily (as judged by the organisers) on hard-coded elements that are solely deemed to be due to test-set leakage.
- At the end of the competition we will ask the top 10 participants (as determined by the leader board) to submit their results on a larger, unseen test data set. This will determine the final ranking of the leader board and deterimine the winners and runner ups.
- Participants are allowed to merge into teams. In this case, they must notify the organisers to deactivate their individual aliases and they must create a joint (group) alias. The group alias shall then be treated as a single participant for all purposes, including the restriction on the number of daily submissions and the prize received. All members of a winning team will be listed as winners of the competition and invited for further collaboration (e.g. for publishing the results with the organisers). However, a single prize will be awarded to the entire team. The team can -of course- decide how to receive the prize (e.g. nominate a single member to receive it, or split a monetary equivalent among them).
In the case of a draw
- Should two or more top-ranked participants have the same final score, we will require the participants to submit their algorithms. This is to check that no plagiarism has occured.
- The algorithms will be tested on an expanded test set which includes a larger number of Ariel spectra to determine the winning one among them.
Multiple accounts policy
Multiple accounts registered in the same participant’s name are not allowed as they can violate the one-submission-a-day rule. When such occurrences are detected, the participant will be contacted to select one of their accounts to keep and the remaining will be deleted. Participants who don’t cooperate with this will have all their accounts deleted.
Collaboration/team submissions policy & Sharing the award
Team submissions are allowed, the prize can only be paid out to one contact.
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Once the competition closes, the registered team member will be contacted by the organisers and will act (in the first instance) as the recipient of the prize money.
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We will check that the other team members have not submitted solutions to the competition. Note that it is fine if other team members have also registered with different accounts, provided they did not submit any solutions, as doing so could violate the one-submission-a-day rule for the team. In the latter case the team will be disqualified.
Reasons for disqualification
In case of plagiarism, forced test set leakage, failure to produce a description of the solution when requested or to conform with the multiple accounts or the team submissions policies, a participant will be disqualified and the next-in-rank participant will be considered in their place.