# Official Competition Rules

By participating in this competition, you agree to be bound by these Official Rules.

## 1. Acceptance of Rules
Participation in the competition constitutes entrant's full and unconditional agreement to these Official Rules and Sponsor's decisions, which are final and binding in all matters related to the competition.

## 2. Eligibility
- Participants must be of legal age in their jurisdiction.
- Employees of the host organization and their immediate family members are ineligible if applicable.
- No purchase necessary.

## 3. Competition Period
The competition begins on [Start Date] and ends on [End Date]. Submissions after the deadline will not be accepted.

## 4. Team Mergers
Team mergers are allowed until [Merger Deadline, usually 7 days before end].

## 5. Submission Limits
- Daily submissions: 5 per team.
- Total submissions: Unlimited, but only the 2 selected submissions will be used for final leaderboard.

## 6. External Data
- Use of external data is [Allowed / Prohibited / Allowed with restrictions].
  For this competition: External data is allowed, but must be publicly available and properly cited. Pre-trained models are permitted if openly available.

## 7. Submission Format
- Submissions must be in CSV format.
- File name: submission.csv
- Columns: 'id' (or sample index) and 'soil_moisture' (predicted value in cm³/cm³).
- No additional columns or rows.

## 8. Evaluation
- Primary metric: unbiased Root Mean Square Difference (ubRMSD).
- Final ranking based on private leaderboard (hidden test set).

## 9. Code Requirements
- No code competition; standard submissions allowed.
- Reproducibility encouraged but not required.

## 10. Prohibited Conduct
- No private sharing of code or solutions outside team.
- No attempts to reverse-engineer the test set.
- Violations may result in disqualification.

## 11. Prizes
[If any prizes: Describe here. If no prizes, state "No monetary prizes; medals and ranking only."]

## 12. Intellectual Property
Participants retain ownership of their submissions but grant host a license to use for evaluation and promotion.

For full Kaggle Terms of Use, see: https://www.kaggle.com/terms