UIUC Holds 10th annnual Reflections | Projections

dkaplan1 writes "ACM@UIUC will be holding their 10th annual Reflections | Projections Midwest computing conference on October 22-24. The 3-day event will feature a job fair and numerous speakers including: Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, Andrea Pessino who worked on Warcraft 3, and many others. And be sure to check out MechMania, an intense C++ AI programming contest. Registration for the conference is $20 for meals and a t-shirt. Please visit www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference for details."

"an intense C++ AI programming contest"

[tcopeland]

I'm surprised that they're not using Ruby [ruby-lang.org], Java, or Python for this... seems like those languages might lend themselves a bit more easily to something like this.

In fact, the first thing I thought about when I saw this was IBM's Robocode [ibm.com] framework - which is in Java.

Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest"

[N1ck0]

I have nothing against Python, Ruby, Java, etc...but they weren't all that in 1995 when Mechmania started, and most of the classes at the time were, and still are, C/C++ based. Not that change is a bad thing, we've concidered it before...BTW usually calls to any external libraries are allowed. Mechmania Coordinator Emeritus, -Nicko

Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest"

[tcopeland]

> in 1995 when Mechmania started

Ah, OK, that makes sense.

> usually calls to any external
> libraries are allowed

Cool, thanks for the info!

Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest"

[kupci]

Really? I'd think the opposite. Most games *are* written in C++ for one thing, although Java seems to be making some inroads in the mobile phone games market. Also, there was a recent TopCoder contest, i.e. a similar programming contest, in which the programmer who won used C.

Re:"an intense C++ AI programming contest"

[tcopeland]

> Most games *are* written in C++

Sure, yup, production commercial games are written in C++, I agree.

I guess I found it surprising because I thought the emphasis would be more on the AI side of things, not the performance side. I thought that one of those more dynamic languages would lend itself more easily to that sort of thing... so programmers could concentrate more on, say, squad tactics, and less on pointer twiddling.

But Nicko's explanation (see his reply to my earlier post) makes sense - they've

Review of the conference

[generationxyu]

I come from UIC [uic.edu], sister campus of the honorable UIUC. We got down to Chambana at about 5:30 Friday, and didn't do much that night, as all the Friday events were over. Saturday we heard Charles Leiserson from MIT talk about shared-memory multiprocessing in the Cilk language, that the MIT AI lab came up with. It was very interesting, especially the charts and raw numbers... the best performance they got was from the 8 queens problem. Running on one processor, it took T1 seconds (I forget the exact figure)