Google AI Challenge
Artificial inteligence(AI) is a complex branch of computer science involving a lot of research by private and academic entities. The Google AI Challenge brings bot writers around a simple and fun idea. The idea is to write a bot to play a strategy game against other bots.
In the next challenge the bots will play an Ants game where they control an ant colony fighting for resources against another colonies. The system is functional but in beta version. There is a set of APIs for most programming languages, a couple of tutorials and the source code for the system itself is available.
The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club is organizing the contest with Google as a sponsor. There are no listed prizes but for people with some spare time it will provide quite enough entertainment value. I hope to have a least a bit of spare time for this and play a bit with it.
Most information is on the forum and there is also a beta site.