Prizes

$104K from the Laude Institute Moonshots Seed Grant. Winners are determined by the headline score described on the evaluation page, computed on the hidden test set after final submissions close.

Prizes are awarded separately in each track, so a human-designed method never competes with an agent-designed one for the same prize. Across both tracks the prize pool splits as follows —

1^st

$16K

2 winners · $8K each

2^nd

$20K

4 winners · $5K each

3^rd

$18K

6 winners · $3K each

Where the $104K goes

$54K Winner prizes: Per track ($27K × 2): one $8K first prize, two $5K second prizes, three $3K third prizes. Tracks are scored on the same hidden tests but awarded separately.
$30K Travel awards: 15–20 grants for early-career researchers to attend the NeurIPS workshop.
$20K Outreach & education: Website, starter-kit repo, tutorials, reproducible walkthroughs, baseline documentation, participant communication channels.

Winner prizes in full

Six prizes in each track, twelve winners in total. The totals do not descend across the three places — there are more winners at second and third than at first.

Place	Per prize	Per track	Both tracks	Winners
1st	$8K × 1	$8K	$16K	2
2nd	$5K × 2	$10K	$20K	4
3rd	$3K × 3	$9K	$18K	6
Total		$27K	$54K	12

The two tracks

Track 1 Human Team: Conventional ML-competition workflow.
Methods designed and supervised by human participants. Algorithm/model design → submission → evaluation. Standard NeurIPS competition track.
Track 2 Agent Team: Coding agents / LLM-driven recursive systems.
Methods produced by coding agents or LLM-based evolutionary algorithms that iteratively select, mutate, and evaluate candidate solutions without human supervision. The agent system and the complete evolutionary trace must be shared before prize evaluation.

Compute and funding

Evaluation runs on the Stanford Sherlock and GenBio GPU clusters (NVIDIA H100 / H200 80 GB). The challenge is supported by the Laude Institute Moonshots Seed Grant. Prize amounts are part of the competition proposal currently under review and may change before launch.