For several years now, the CS Club at the University of Waterloo have been staging an AI programming contest.  Google have lately stepped in as a sponsor, and the contest has been open the public for the last couple of years.  This year’s AI Challenge involves a simulated ant colony competing in a sort of multi-turn strategy game.

A couple of SplatSpace members have started hacking on some bots for the challenge, with an eye towards forming a SplatSpace team and entering the challenge. If you’re at all interested in AI programming, and want to join the team, just let us know. Everyone is welcome to participate. Extensive AI programming knowledge is NOT necessary to compete (although it might be useful to *win*) and the provided “starter kits” make it very simple to get your first bot up and running and “in the game.” Submissions can be coded in any of a number of languages including C, Erlang, Java, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Common Lisp, OCaml, etc.