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