I am not affiliated with the prize in any way, but I think this could represent a valuable opportunity for the GP/EA community: the tasks in ARC can be solved through *program synthesis*, as stated by Chollet himself [5], a function GP excels at; and the capacity of learning from a few samples is another strong suite of GP. Not to mention, just participating in the contest and comparing against other approaches could lead to cross-fertilization of new ideas, and even help promote GP as a robust AI alternative to the now more prominent DL approaches.
After discussing with colleagues, I decided to spread the news far and wide, in the hope that more and more people from our community would decide to take up the challenge. The current state of the art performance on ARC is still low (less than 40% accuracy on test at the time of writing), so the entry barriers should not be that high: now it's a good moment for GP researchers to take on the world and test our mettle!
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547
[2] https://aiguide.substack.com/p/why-the-abstraction-and-reasoning
[3] https://arcprize.org/competition
[4] https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/arc-prize-2024/
[5] https://arcprize.org/guide
