The Loebner Prize, based on a fund of over $100,000 established by New
York businessman Hugh G. Loebner, is awarded annually for the computer
program that best emulates natural human behavior. During the
contest, a panel of independent judges attempts to determine whether
the responses on a computer terminal are being produced by a computer
or a person, along the lines of the Turing Test. The designers of the
best program each year win a cash award and a medal. If a program
passes the test in all its particulars, then the entire fund will be
paid to the program's designer and the fund abolished. For further
information about the Loebner Prize, see the URL

   http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

or write to Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, 11
Waterhouse Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, or call 617-491-9020.

Also look at:

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/papers/loebner-rev-html/loebner-rev-html.html

for a published criticism of the Loebner.

The Robot World Cup Initiative (RoboCup) is an attempt to foster AI
and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem
where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. For
this purpose, RoboCup chose to use soccer game, and organize RoboCup:
The Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences. In order for a robot
team to actually performa soccer game, various technologies must be
incorporated including: design principles of autonomous agents,
multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning,
robotics, and sensor-fusion.  RoboCup is a task for a team of multiple
fast-moving robots under a dynamic environment. RoboCup also offers a
software platform for research on the software aspects of RoboCup.
Information can be found at: http://www.robocup.org/02.html

The BEAM Robot Olympics is a robot exhibition/competition started in
1991. For more information about the competition, write to BEAM Robot
Olympics, c/o: Mark W. Tilden, MFCF, University of Waterloo, Ontario,
Canada, N2L-3G1, 519-885-1211 x2454, mwtilden@watmath.uwaterloo.ca.

The Gordon Bell Prize competition recognizes outstanding achievements
in the application of parallel processing to practical scientific and
engineering problems. Entries are considered in performance,
price/performance, compiler parallelization and speedup categories,
and a total of $3,000 will be awarded. The prizes are sponsored by
Gordon Bell, a former National Science Foundation division director
who is now an independent consultant.  Contestants should send a
three- or four-page executive summary to 1993 Gordon Bell Prize, 
c/o Marilyn Potes, IEEE Computer Society, 10662 Los Vaqueros Cir., 
PO Box 3014, Los Alamitos, CA 90720-1264, before May 31, 1993.

AAAI has an annual robot building competition.  The anonymous FTP site
for the contest is/was 
   aeneas.mit.edu:/pub/ACS/6.270/AAAI/

This site has the manual and the rules.  To be added to the
rbl-94@ai.mit.edu mailing list for discussing the AAAI robot building
contest, send mail to rbl-94-request@ai.mit.edu. See also the 6.270
robot building guide in part 4 of this FAQ.

CASC theorem prover competition is held annually at the CADE
conference.  First-order logic theorem prover compete for recognition
and plaques.  The web page for this years contest (1999) is found at:
http://www.cs.jcu.edu.au/~tptp/CASC-16/

The International Computer Chess Association presents an annual prize
for the best computer-generated annotation of a chess game. The output
should be reminiscent of that appearing in newspaper chess columns,
and will be judged on both the correctness and depth of the variations
and also on the quality of the program's written output. The deadline
is December 31, 1994. For more information, write to Tony Marsland
<tony@cs.ualberta.ca>, ICCA President, Computing Science Department,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada T6G 2H1, call 403-492-3971, or
fax 403-492-1071.