Artificial Intelligence bots in an epic battle of StarCraft
In 2011 we started a tournament of AI bots that battle one another in probably the most popular strategy video game: StarCraft. These bots are made in programming language C++ by students worldwide. It teaches them all the advanced methods of artificial intelligence.
Tournament webpage: http://bwapiproject.netii.net/
YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/certicky/
My bot will kick your bot's ass! (Educational impact)
The tournament is extremely competitive, and it's exactly how it should be. After all, the best motivation is always beating everyone else in what you do. Students enjoy spending most of their free time by learning the AI techniques and programming, just to beat their friends in a game. Everybody gains some hands-on experience, and winners have a nice entry in their resumes before finishing school. This is what I call a progressive education!
What We Need
2011 year of the tournament had 50 participants! While this number is quite high, we hope to get even more in the following years. We also want to offer some interesting prizes for the winners. Help is needed with a couple of things:
-
Financial and/or material support for: prize money & trophies (obviously), domains & hosting, referees (there are hundreds of games to be played and watched), advertisement & PR services (ads and posters are not free, and we want every IT student to know about this)
-
Help with promotion: Make some noise about this! We want to see the tournament in newspapers, forums, school classes, web portals, twitter, facebook - simply anywhere. We will gladly return the favor by linking back to you or mentioning your name.
-
Ideas and support in gaming community: We would love to work with some StarCraft commentators and casters, gaming portals, etc. Any new ideas are most welcome.
What You Get
Tournament's website has a significant number of visitors consisting of programmers, AI researchers and students of various IT specialisations. Videos on our YouTube channel have quite high view count. We're also planning some presentations on lead IT conferences. By contributing, you can get a cheap targeted advertisement in the IT and AI community, and some cool bonuses. Check out the perks (right side of the page) for details.
