Add competition: BuildArena Construction Challenge

[w3nhao]

BuildArena Construction Challenge S01, running on Kaggle as a Community Hackathon. Hosted by the AI for Scientific Simulation and Discovery Lab at Westlake University, sponsored by Uniforce AI.

Participants use LLM agents to build a Besiege machine through the BuildArena 2.0 MCP, then hand-pilot it into orbit in The Broken Beyond space sandbox. The score comes from the run's trajectory CSV (orbit progress, orbit stability, survival) minus a cost penalty covering part count, token usage, and failed MCP calls. Two build modes share one leaderboard: Autopilot, where the agent builds unattended once the run starts, at a ×1.15 coefficient, and Copilot, where you steer the agent over multiple turns of natural language, at ×1.00. A human-built exhibition track runs alongside and stays out of the AI leaderboard.

Links:

• Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/build-arena-human-ai-colleberation-engineering-challenge
• Challenge site: https://build-arena.github.io/ConstructionChallenge/
• Code: https://github.com/build-arena/BuildArena-2.0
• Paper (ICML 2026): https://openreview.net/forum?id=QAQKmIp3SZ

One thing to flag on the prize field. The Kaggle sidebar still shows $1,000, since a hackathon's prize amount can no longer be edited after creation. The overview page carries an official update raising S01 to $3,000 cash: Agent Master Builder $700, Best Build Autopilot $500, Best Build Copilot $500, Powerful but Brutal $300, Cheap Thrills $300, Most Creative Machine $300, Funniest Failure $200, Community Favorite $200. I put $3,000 in the entry. Happy to switch it to the figure Kaggle displays if you would rather match the platform.

The hackathon opened 8 Jul 2026 AOE and the deadline was extended to 12 Sep 2026 AOE. conference is left null — the challenge grew out of an ICML 2026 paper and is not part of a conference competitions track.