AI Challenge

The AI Challenge was an international artificial intelligence programming contest started by the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club.

Initially the contest was for University of Waterloo students only. In 2010, the contest gained sponsorship from Google and allowed it to extend to international students and the general public.

Description

Each participant wrote a self-contained computer program to play a game versus an opponent, and then uploaded the source code to a server. The contest engine used the Trueskill ranking algorithm for matchmaking and to generate the rankings.

After a match, spectators could watch the match using a browser.

The contest was open source.^[1] Contestants were welcomed to improve the contest back-end.

Winners

Contest	Theme	Winner
2009/Fall	Rock-Paper-Scissors	amstan
2010/Spring	Tron Lightcycles[2][3]	a1k0n (Andy Sloane)[4]
2010/Fall	Planet Wars[5]	Bocsimackó (Gábor Melis)[6][7]
2011/Fall	Ants[8]	xathis (Mathis Lichtenberger)[9][10]

References

1. AI Challenge Source Code Repository, GitHub (2011-03-01)
2. Google AI Challenge: Tron - Accepting entries in Java, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Scheme, Haskell, and C# : programming
3. Google & University of Waterloo AI Challenge - Java Tron Bot - Experiment Garden
5. There's a new Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars (Galcon clone) : lisp
6. Gábor Melis' () blog - Planet Wars Post-Mortem
7. Hungarian Lisp developer walks away with Google AI contest | ZDNet
8. AI Challenge Fall 2011 - Ants Now Open
9. Xathis' User Profile
10. xathis post mortem

External links

• AI Challenge
• Past Tron (Winter 2010) Challenge
• University of Waterloo Computer Science Club