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Registration is CLOSED and has been for quite some time.
Please come again next year, or just read about this year's competition below.

Results and source code from this year ARE UP! See below.

ACM @ UIUC's Ninth Annual C++/AI Programming Contest

October 17-19, 2003
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Digital Computer Lab

17 24 Hours
16 14 Teams
34 Computers
Oceans of Caffeine

Part of Reflections|Projections 2003

Sponsored by:

Michigan Economic Development Corporation

 

Success!

Although there were concerns, after the dust settled it was clear that MechMania IX was successful! The MechMania staff would like to thank the conference staff for running Reflections|Projections and taking care of the "minor" issues like food, prizes, lab space, and all those other little things. It couldn't have happened without your support. And of course, a big thank-you goes out to all the participants. You're the reason we do this every year, and we hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did!

Who won?

1st - Nine CIA Ham Men, UIUC
    John Carrino, Adam Eidukas, and Brian Pellin
2nd - The Outsourced Foreign Half-wage Laborers, Iowa State University
    Evan Rothmayer, Andres Reinot, and Chad Austin
3nd - *happy campers*, UIUC
    Jered Wierzbicki, Chris Banek, and Jeff Tamer
4rd - Bears, Southwest Missouri State University
    Jerry Yoakum, Alex McHale, and Nasser al'Ahmad
5th - Ragnarok, UIUC
    Tim Kuehlhorn, Kent Murra, and Erik Freund

So what was it all about, exactly?

To quote from the README file in the source code distribution:
"This year it's back to the basics: mechs. Nothing fancy, just two teams of AI-controlled mechs slugging it out, with victory to the last team standing. Each team consists of one (or more, but probably just one) base and several mechs. Bases are a non-renewable resource - there is no way to build more, and since there is also no way to regain health, they must be guarded carefully. However, every base has a sizable amount of health, and a laser for self-defense. Bases build mechs using your team's money (or perhaps using a wittier-named resource. Whatever.) That's also about all they do. :)"
For more details, check the online documentation which has a lot of information about the goal of the game and game mechanics.

Format of the Competition

This year, we tried something a little different. Last year's contest ran for the whole night, and a lot of people liked that change. So this year, we also ran for 24 hours - from 10:00am Saturday morning to 10:00am Sunday morning. However, to be fair to the contestants who had a long drive ahead of them, we only allowed 19 hours of coding time per team. Every team needed to be signed out and completely out of the lab for the other five hours, although they could chose when they wanted to use these "break" hours. The teams used this time to eat, sleep, scheme, plan, and generally stay sane. The arrangement worked out well, and will probably continue in future years.

Gimme the source already!

The source code for MechMania is available under the GNU GPL for free download. The code was written, tested, and built on Linux machines. Most of it builds under MacOS X, but Windows users are on their own. The documentation is included in the source, and can be extracted into a number of pretty formats with doxygen. (The configuration file for this is "mechdoc.") There's also some introductory instructions in "INSTALL."
The source: mm9.tar.gz, 744350 bytes last time I checked.

The source code for the contestants will be posted too, pending their permission. If you competed and want the source code for your own team, email mechmania@acm.uiuc.edu.

Wrap-up and Random Thoughts

We had such a good time that the we're all doing it again next year. We hope to see you there for MechMania X!

These guys rock, and also have competed in the past several MechManias. They made a comic about this year's MechMania. They also did one for last year's MechMania, which is not as... "kind." (Although much funnier.)

You cannot defeat the quad laser.