The first annual "Humies" competition was held at the 2004 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2004) in Seattle. Entries were solicited for cash awards for human-competitive results that were produced by any form of genetic and evolutionary computation and that were published in the open literature during previous year. The publication can be a conference paper (e.g., a regular paper, poster, or late-breaking paper) or any work published elsewhere in the open literature (e.g., a journal article, technical report, thesis, book, book chapter) or other paper that has received final unconditional acceptance and not subject to further editing (that is, is "in press").
The criterion for "human-competitiveness" is that an automatically created result is considered "human-competitive" if it satisfies at least one of the following eight criteria.
(A) The result was patented as an invention in the past, is an improvement over a patented invention, or would qualify today as a patentable new invention.
(B) The result is equal to or better than a result that was accepted as a new scientific result at the time when it was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
(C) The result is equal to or better than a result that was placed into a database or archive of results maintained by an internationally recognized panel of scientific experts.
(D) The result is publishable in its own right as a new scientific result — independent of the fact that the result was mechanically created.
(E) The result is equal to or better than the most recent human-created solution to a long-standing problem for which there has been a succession of increasingly better human-created solutions.
(F) The result is equal to or better than a result that was considered an achievement in its field at the time it was first discovered.
(G) The result solves a problem of indisputable difficulty in its field.
(H) The result holds its own or wins a regulated competition involving human contestants (in the form of either live human players or human-written computer programs).