AI Challenge

 

For those who do not yet know what AI Challenge is, I introduced it in a previous post here. Innovision’08 completed yesterday with the AI Challenge also being hugely popular and largely successful. We had 26 code entries for AI Challenge this time around with some of them spanning thousands of lines of code. This is roughly 250% increase in participation from the first edition of the AI Challenge in the year 2007. With over 96 teams (of 3 each) registering and 26 teams being able to successfully submit running codes, the challenge was hugely successful.

The simulations were done on-site yesterday with open invitations to participating teams to see the simulators crunching it out in real time. The teams were divided in 4 groups with the league stages involving matches of every team with every other team in the group twice. Two teams were then selected from each group to go into the Super 8 stage of the game from where we got our final 3 winning entries. But yesterday’s simulations were not all, the work on the challenge started around one and a half months back and it ran online for 15 days.

All the congratulations are due for Mohit, Vijit and Chirag as they have done some really wonderful work during this period. They have had sleepless nights, long debugging sessions and attended phone calls till 1 AM at nights while solving the queries of the participants. And I have still not counted the usual rigors of organizing an event. We have all learned a lot during this small period of time and I sincerely believe that the third edition of AI will be even better. Some of the additions planned for the next edition are : Graphical Simulator, Automated Code-runs and of-course minimal bugs.

So what are the next steps ahead of us:

1. Make the codes, rules and other docs available online at : http://code.google.com/p/ai-challenge/ in the downloads section of the project.

2. Write letters to winners asking if they would like their codes published online with due credits under the GPLv3 Licence.

So, the challenge will be still available for playing and you can still send us your entries at either (deepankgupta [AT] gmail [DOT] com) or (mohitgenii [AT] gmail [DOT] com). If we like your code, we will publish it online and provide you with detailed reports and logs on its performance against others.

Before I end, I want to thank all the 26 participating teams who took it as a personal challenge to develop some great codes and be a part of this wonderful event. Hope to hear your comments and complaints about the event here.