ACM Java Challenge Revealed (And Over)

thirty-seven writes "The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals are being held today, at 8:30am local time in Beverly Hills. But before the "real" contest started, the teams got to have some fun competing in the Java Challenge, where the teams write Java programs that directly compete against each other in a simulated environment. Although it was a big secret ahead of time, a pdf on the site now reveals that this year's Challenge was writing a program to drive a race car in a simulated demolition derby. No official results have been released yet, but according to their coach, the University of Waterloo team came in third overall after a slow start."

Sounds similar to Robocode

[BadBrainDay]

This idea of writing a Java class to a particular spec and then having them compete directly against eachother sounds pretty similar to the idea behind Robocode [robocode.net] which has been discussed here before [slashdot.org].

I suppose that given Robocode is an IBM project and IBM's involvement in the ACM contest this isn't too suprising.

I wonder if there was any kind of graphical client to go with this like there is in Robocode, and if so if it will be available? Watching a little demolition derby with cars of my own creation

should apply to the Darpa Challenge

[AssFace]

(http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/)

That's the one where you have to get a car/truck to drive Vegas to LA (or is it vice versa?) soley controlled by computer... this sounds like it is a start (although without any physical part)

Object Oriented Battle Royal

[dmorin]

Nice. Last year's challenge was to build a "wizard" that would find and shoot other wizards with spells. Very similar to the zillion C-Robots type games that are out there these days from the looks of it. Just with a bit more flavor.

If I'm reading the rules correctly, you can rapidly test your creation by constantly dropping it into a private snapshot world and seeing how it does. XP anybody?

I so want to play with this. Obligatory geek comment: What would be cool is to put all the brains into some sort of externally defined data file and then run it as a genetic algorithm. Whenever there are two wizards left use them to populate the next round. See how many generations it takes before you've got an MCP.

hmmm

[Miguel de Icaza]

don't forget dotbots [brinkster.com] which is an upgrade to the original robocode to support all the multitudinous .NET languages. And should run on mono sometime in a few months maybe......

i wrote a champion bot in 17 lines of code :^)