General Overview

• 3 people teams
• 2 computers per team
• C++ A.I. Programming
• Contest details and API released Friday night
• Coding begins Saturday for 17 hours with a 2 hour closure for the conference keynote
• Competition is Sunday
• Lots of food & soda provided by us to keep you going. But NO eating in the labs.

How the Game Works:

You will write all C++ classes and game engine code will be provided -- your team must code the AI that controls your mechs during the game. One or two complete sample clients will be provided.

Using the API and framework we provide, you will implement a 'Team' class that controls the behavior of a "team" of "mechs" competing with another team in a virtual arena. The API will provide methods for examining the game environment and the opposing team and sending commands to your team.

Be aware that no AI constructs will be provided. The constestants will have to write all code during the contest and no outside code can be brought in. The only exception is that you are allowed to bring published books for reference.

The MechMania staff will not tolerate cheating of any kind and we will sick our Mechs on those dubbed cheaters.

Schedule:

Friday Evening: kick-off & API released
Saturday: 17 hours of coding with 2 hour break for the keynote talk
Sunday: Competition

Finalized schedule breakdown will be up soon.

Knowledge expected:

In order to properly be prepared for the Mechmania AI programming contest, the user should be aware of the following C++ topics:

• Class inheritance, casting, sub classing.
• STL lists and vectors
• General pointer logic
• Object oriented programming (Singletons, Factories, etc)
• Namespaces and static functions

The contestants should also be familiar with the following development environments and editing tools:

• Red Hat 7.3
• Make (Makefiles will be provided)
• g++ compiler
• Xemacs, Emacs, Vim, and Kdevelop will be provided. Very little technical support is available for Kdevelop.
• KDE 3

Sponsored by:

Michigan Economic Development Corporation

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

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

Questions? Comments?
Contact: mechmania@acm.uiuc.edu

Part of Reflections|Projections 2003