Hah, this is about the ~2010 Google ai contest “planet wars”. I participated in the 2011 iteration, ‘ants’, which was a fun but humbling experience. Anyone else try that? I recall the final winner’s solution was far less elegant than I expected after the code was released, but man was it effective.
The AI Challenges were so cool and I had hoped there would be more of them.
A "humbling experience" is definitely the right choice of words.
I did some minor work on a PoC for the one after Ants. It was multi-player (or: multi-bot) Asteroids but things fizzled out as most of the people organizing moved on to other things.
