Various subfields of AI have held contests by defining a standard task and inviting re- searchers to do their best. Examples include the DARPA Grand Challenge for robotic cars, The International Planning Competition, the Robocup robotic soccer league, the TREC infor- mation retrieval event, and contests in machine translation, speech recognition. Investigate only two of these contests, and describe the progress made over the years. To what degree have the contests advanced toe state of the art in AI? Do what degree do they hurt the field by drawing energy away from new ideas?