IMO, the best approach would be to jump right in, without looking into what other people are doing. People have tried to solve these problems using the current trend (deep reinforcement learning), and so far it has not worked out. Most such contests are usually won by methods which are somewhat different from the current paradigm. For instance, Imagenet 2012, and to some extent, the Vizdoom challenge was won by a method which departed significantly from the paradigm of the time.
If you have the time to work on this contest, I'd recommend trying a method which is either not deep learning or not reinforcement learning or not both. There will be enough submissions from people who will try obvious ideas, and so you're better off trying something unique. Good luck and have fun!
ImageNet has been won over and over very much by improvements on "what other people were doing" for the past 6 years, with incremental improvements on convnets.
ConvNets were invented by Yann Lecun, a professor of machine learning who had spent his life investigating these kinds of subjects.
What I'm saying is, machine learning is super interesting. You need to really be ready invest yourself though.
If you have the time to work on this contest, I'd recommend trying a method which is either not deep learning or not reinforcement learning or not both. There will be enough submissions from people who will try obvious ideas, and so you're better off trying something unique. Good luck and have fun!