Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-run savings bank, is sponsoring an international online competition focused on artificial intelligence as part of Eastern Europe’s first Artificial Intelligence Journey forum.

Participants will be asked to put together solutions that would bring them one step closer to developing AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, the intelligence of a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can) and algorithms capable of self-learning and successfully passing exam tests at various levels of complexity. Both individuals and teams are eligible for participation.

Experts will assess the new algorithms’ ability to correctly answer questions on certain topics based on information from publicly available (limited) data sources. All algorithms will be expected to cope with school curriculum questions.

Such questions will include tests for knowledge and ability to analyze, as well as essays based on a given text. Essays that will be found by automatic evaluation to be meaningful and unplagiarized will be further assessed based on standard methodology for high school graduates. The key evaluation criteria include the soberness of the author’s stance, the choice of arguments, logical structure of one’s text, presence/absence of syntactic errors, punctuation literacy, etc. Professional teachers and coaches from Moscow and Novosibirsk will participate in the assessment.

This is Russia’s first such large-scale competition. The total prize fund is reported to be $46,150; the winner will walk away with $15,380 in prize money.