OFFICIAL EVENT RULES

The rules below have been changed greatly since this page was first written, but they will likely be very stable from this point forth.

Overview:
Originally, the event was to have two phases, but in order to make the event fairer and shorter, this organization has been replaced with the one explained below.

At 4:00 pm on January 28th, the first team's (to be randomly determined) gatekeeper will be given control of the door.  Members of the four teams will line up in either of the two hallways approaching the door.  A team can put members in both hallways, and they are free to change positions or order at any time.  Spectators and members that have already tried to get past the door can observe from inside the lab, on the other side of the door.  The teams take turns approaching the door, where the first team to approach the door will be determined randomly.  On each turn, a team may:

1.  Send a member towards the door to attempt admission.  No matter what the outcome, this member is out of the round after the attempt.  If a member fails to get through the door, he/she will have to enter the lab through the door on the western hallway. 

2.  Pass their turn.  Each team can pass 3 times without penalty.  After these 3, they may choose to spend their turn by removing a member from the round without having him/her approach the door.

Each team should have an event captain that will decide who to send to the door and when to pass.  This event captain will also be responsible for starting that team's gatekeeper.

After all team members have approached the door, the round ends and the next team's gatekeeper is loaded.

Scoring:

BONUS POINTS: For the most humorous gatekeeper (# to be determined).  To be decided by a panel of honored judges.

So, assuming that each team sends the same number of participants, a door that admits everyone and identifies noone by name will receive a negative score.  I think that's appropriate-- I don't believe you could describe such a system as "positive."

You'll note that there is no bonus for identifying your own team members by name.   That shouldn't be surprising if you consider how easy it would be to simply make sure your team approached the system in a predetermined order.

This scoring system gives an advantage to teams with more participants, so make sure you rally your team on the day of the competition!

Rules, Rules, Rules:

DURING DEVELOPMENT:

1.  A gatekeeper can only accept realtime input from the camera.  No communication can be made to a gatekeeper program through any other channels.  This includes socket connections, files, cellphones, psychics, etc, etc.  Your gatekeeper can store files and read them, but these files can not be modified by any other program during the event.  This is the only really strict rule-- breaking it means disqualification.

2.  All teams must submit their final gatekeepers by 4:00 pm on the 27th.   All that is needed by 4pm is an email describing the location of the files and DETAILED instructions describing how to start the gatekeeper.  At 4:00 pm on the 27th, futher remote logins to the 4 door machines will be blocked.  Your system will be loaded at least once on the 28th before the competition for testing purposes.

AT THE EVENT:

1.  Only one member of any team can approach the door at a time.

2.  No member can touch the camera, touchscreen, or door during the competition.

3.  No team is allowed to modify the environment during the competition: ie, no objects can be attached to the walls or left on the floor.

4.  A team can use any sort of prop (hats, signs, flashlights) to distinguish themselves from other teams, but once a prop is used in an attempt, it can't be passed back to members approaching the door.  (it would slow things down too much).   Every member will have to have their own.

5.  After a member has entered the vision lab, either through the automatic door or through the western hallway if they failed to activate the door, they must stay in the vision lab until the end of the round (or, at least, stay away from the team members getting ready to approach the door).  There are just too many people to keep track of, and I'd rather not have to keep a checklist of who has approached the door.

6.  Each member has 5 seconds to activate the door.  If the door doesn't open after 5 seconds, that member must enter the vision lab by the western hallway.  (Chez Viola's service entrance).

7.  If a team's gatekeeper loses its connection to the gatekeeper server during the competition, it can be restarted *one* time.

8.  Only one connection can be made to the gatekeeper server from your team's gatekeeper.  I need to enforce this to be certain that another team's gatekeeper isn't also connected and giving commands to the door during your team's round.

9.  Players must leave their face visible when approaching the door.  (It's not possible for other teams to recognize you by name if you're covering your face!)

10.  A count will be made at 4:05 pm of the team members present from each team.   After this count, no more members can be participants in the event, and all of these members must stay until the end.  If they don't stay, opposing teams receive a point as if they recognized you by name.

11.  Players can't interact with the camera if they are not approaching the door

What you are given:
Your official Gatekeeper Software Development Kit, downloadable from the Materials page, allows you to:

1.  access the most current image taken by the door camera. 
2.  open the door
3.  instruct the door to speak any text aloud
4.  display an image on the door kiosk touchscreen

The SDK is a collection of Matlab files and the Gatedemon, written in C++.   Gatedemon handles the interface between your code and the door.  The SDK is designed to make it very easy to write a gatekeeper in Matlab, but if you'd rather use a different language, you can.  You can still use the gatedemon with your system, or you can write socket code to connect to the doorman server directly.  Please let me know if you would like the protocol for the doorman server.

Originally, the gatekeeper SDK allowed teams to develop gatekeepers locally on their machines, obtaining images from the door camera over NFS.  For a slew of reasons, this approach has been proven inadequate.  Instead, each team will be given their own Pentium 400 machine running Red Hat Linux:

Teams will still be able to have numerous members working on gatekeepers in parallel on these machines because the images will still be provided through a file interface.   If, for the sake of framerate,  you would like to abandon the file interface and only allow one member to develop at a time, send me email and I'll explain how you should begin.  Make sure that your team won't mind you doing this!

The development phase:
As soon as the SDK is released, teams can begin constructing their gatekeepers immediately.  During the development phase, the door will be controlled by the manufacturer's motion sensors (we can't have tons of gatekeepers telling the door to open or not open all at once!).  Instead, when you connect to the doorman server, the name you provide will appear on the touchscreen to the left of the door.  Beside your name will be a red light.  When your system tells the door to open, this light will turn green.  When you tell it close, it changes back to red.  You'll be able to make the door say anything you want and display anything you want during the development phase as well.  Yes, you can point the touchscreen to ANY web page in the world, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd keep the pages appropriate.  Likewise with the speech synthesizer.  Make sure your gatekeeper is polite. :)

Some suggestions:

Face recognition is allowed, naturally, as are any sort of learning-based algorithms-- you will be able to acquire training images for your team in the days leading up to the competition by asking your team members to stand in front of the door and grabbing their picture with the SDK.

For problems or questions, contact jnorris@ai.mit.edu.
Last updated: January 18, 1999.