bmmoAI Competition

The competition was a great success. I held it two Saturday’s ago, on March 7th. There was a modest turn out of 12 students in total, although only six stuck around for completion.

There were a few minor technical difficulties encountered during the competition. First, I had trouble getting the projector hooked up to my laptop. There wasn’t a simple, ‘Laptop’ cord to plus in. I had to go digging in the mess of cables behind the computer to find a video in cord. Secondly, I had trouble completely disabling my firewall (to allow the AI clients to connect to my locally hosted game). It turns out Windows 7 has two firewalls. One for trusted networks (the one I turned off first); and a second one for untrusted networks.

About half an hour into the competition, one of the students asked for some help getting the sample client to work. Apparently I had a glaring logic problem. The client waited in an infinite loop, looking for an available action point before acting. However, there was no command to query the server for how many action points were available during the loop. I had missed this previously, since my debug environment always had free action points available. At the start of the competition, there were no points available, so the AI was stuck. I quickly published an updated version of the sample AI that actually worked.

I look forward to hosting another competition soon. Abram, one of the competitors and the current ACM president was very pleased with the success of the program. “It actually worked!” he told me halfway though the coding portion of the competition. He said that the last several (3 or 4) competitions he had been to were still being actively developed by the hosts as the students were busy writing their portions. He suggested for next time, that we make a bigger show out of this and envite the other two local colleges to come and compete.

I would like to congratulate the winners below, listed with their final point totals and the prize they selected.

Place	Winner	Points	Prize
1st	Mike	660	4 GB Flash Drive
2nd	Kerber	120	5.5 lb. barrel of licorice
3rd	Nathan	105	2 GB Flash Drive