Contests

Imagine Cup Korea ‘07 – Project Hoshimi AI Programming Battle

By Tony ⋅ January 15, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

Imagine Cup Logo

The fifth year of the Imagine Cup competitions will be holding its finals in Korea this year. Want to receive free travel and accommodations? You’ve got to make it into the finals, and AI Programming category is my personal favourite.

Project Hoshimi Programming Battle (you may skip the quote to just watch the video instead)

Imagine that you are the only one that can save a person, a city, or even a nation and that you can use the right combination of strategy and programming skills to do this. The Project Hoshimi – Programming Battle invitational brings to life the world of Professor Hoshimi and his faithful crew of scientists and programming experts in a fantasy of life and death. This popular competition uses a background story, comic style graphics, and very real challenges to test the skills of programmers everywhere and allow them to compete, directly online, with people all over their nation and eventually the world to see who has the fastest program to save the day. In Project Hoshimi – Programming Battle, you write the code representing the behavior and the strategy of a team of characters going through different types of missions. The results are not only fun to create but also fun to watch as the programs play out in a virtual 3D environment for all to see.

Lengthy description, I know.. so I found a 55 seconds video on YouTube that summarizes key points, and has a clip of the 3D environment involved. Background music and all.

Runthrough of competition details:

Teams of up to 2 individuals
Take-home challenge coded using one of the .NET family of languages (C#, VB .NET, etc.)
March 1st, 2007 – First Round Closes and Registration Ends
All competitors achieving qualifying mark
will move on to round 2

Details and registrations are available at the category’s website. Further resources are available at Project’s dedicated website, including the SDK download.

It is really easy to get started, there are plenty of documentation, samples, and tutorials available. Most importantly it’s fun, there are even unofficial side competitions being hosted between the rounds for bonus practice! This year I have my own projects to keep me busy, but let me know if you are thinking of participating! We could organize something here or on the forums to match people looking to form a team.