Exebit - Fighting Bots

Ever felt frustrated being beaten hands down at a game of chess by a computer bot? Ever wondered how the hell one keeps track of tens of hundreds of look aheads on the fly when playing a strategy game? Now is your chance for revenge. For, we give you the chance to expand your runtime stack capacity from the passably limited organic version of your cerebrum to gigabytes of silicon and more.

Intrigued? Read on...

Dots and Boxes is a two player pencil and paper strategy game, commonly played by fourth graders around the world. Briefly, players alternately connect edges in a grid of points and a player gets to 'own' a square if he completes the fourth side of that square in the grid. But sadly, few see the rich mathematical intricacies behind this sophisticated child's play. We would like to change that. In Fighting Bots, we would like you to build the AI for the game of Dots And Boxes, conforming to a very simple API we'll be providing. (Don't get turned off by the geek talk, you would just have to generate the next move, given the current board state). The API provided by us takes care of connecting to a server, getting you a second player, and giving you visual feedback of a running game. In essence, you would be translating your thought process/strategy into a structured algorithm, and put it according to a simple interface specified by us and voila! You have just built your very own bot! The rules are straightforward. Your bot fights it out with the others in various knock out rounds online. The best bot wins.

Downloads are provided for both the client API and the server application. One may develop their respective clients and test it against themselves, or their friends (or even against the provided sample game) through the server application.

Completed programs may be uploaded as a single executable jar file on the portal. Any number of submissions is allowed but only the final one will be considered for competitive evaluation. In order to facilitate improvement, mock runs will periodically be conducted by us and rankings will be uploaded to give the contestants an idea of where they stand.

In case of any queries, please contact:
Rajkishan G
Email: fightingbots[at]exebit.org