An Intelligent Bug

Today was the IBM Java Challenge, where we got 3 hours to write an AI bot to play the equivalent of an RTS. Due to point balancing issues, the most reliable way to keep yourself in the finals was to drop all of your energy into your base immediately, leaving your ships dead in space. All of the teams placing 3-10 had strategies similar to this.

We had an interesting "bug" where we would use our not-so-good strategy until the round was almost over, and then dump all energy into the base. However, we forgot to reset this for the next round, so the following rounds would be very prosperous. There were some problems with the server, so when they ran it the first time, some teams were not the most recent versions of the bots. So, they ran it again, but with fewer rounds. This dropped us from 22nd place to 41st. The first time, we beat some major US teams including MIT, CMU, and Caltech. Even in the second round, we were just below the halfway point (only 78 teams participated in the Java challenge) and were still ranked first in our region (SD School of Mines was 44th and UW-Madison was in the 60's).

I'm looking forward to getting a copy of the SDK and tournament software for this in a few weeks.