The 2011 AI Challenge is now over. I finished in 71st place. While that’s some way off of my 47th position in Planet Wars, considering the complexity of this year’s challenge and the fact that there was a total of 7,897 entrants this year, compared to less than 5,000 last year, I’m very glad to finish within the top 100 at all. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that about a week before the closing date for submissions, a bunch of highly-ranked entrants publicly posted details of their combat strategy, allowing me to replicate some of it, I wouldn’t have been able to make it into the top 200 at all. As usual, this post will be about the results. I’ll write another post later about my bot in my games blog.

As with last year, once again this year’s contest was dominated by a single person. Bocsimacko who won Planet Wars last year didn’t submit an entry for Ants, but Xathis of Germany basically pulled off the same thing. For almost the entire duration of the contest, not only did Xathis keep the number one spot, he did it with the first version of his bot as well. Admittedly, it was possible only because he’d worked on his bot during the beta phase and most of his testing seems to have taken place on the TCP servers, but it’s an impressive feat nevertheless. We did have a bit of last minute tension as GreenTea of Ukraine supposedly took the number 1 spot for a couple of hours just before the finals ended, but Xathis retook the top spot just in the nick of time.

Another noteworthy contestant was a1k0n of the US. He was the winner of the very first Tron AI Challenge and was the person who started the ball rolling by posting about his bot’s combat strategy, leading others to do the same. I’m also tickled pink that in his inevitable blog post explaining his bot’s strategy, Xathis emulated his forebears by using the same two sentences to start his post-mortem. It seems that our three-year old contest has already established a tradition.

As expected, I was by far the highest ranking participant from Malaysia, though that’s more because of the sheer amount of time I was able to dedicate to the effort rather than any skill or talent. But I was pleasantly surprised that this year, unlike last year, I was not the only serious competitor from Malaysia. By serious, I mean someone who made more effort than simply signing up and submitting a starter bot and did nothing else subsequently. At least three other people from Malaysia submitted fairly decent bots. They kept updating their bots throughout the contest and one of them, ccsuser, finished in a very respectable 512th place.

As for the rest of Asia, notable this year is how many strong entrants there were from China. oldman of China, who was the highest ranking Asian in Planet Wars, finished in 21st place while the top overall Asian was Komaki of Japan who finished in 16th place. But many other entrants from China reached very respectable ranks. There were a lot of entrants from India as well but most of them didn’t do very well, with the highest ranking Indian in 127th place. Sri Lanka, of all Asian countries, did surprisingly well.

As for programming languages, more than ever this year’s contest was dominated by the fast languages. This means lots of Java, C, C++ etc. The poor scripting language users were mostly left in the dust. Given the very unforgiving 500 milliseconds time limit and the computationally intensive nature of this year’s challenge, this is not much of a surprise.

It’s a sure bet that there will be another challenge in 2012 and the forums are already full of suggestions about what game to use next year. It’s also a sure thing that the contest is bound to attract more participants and it becomes more famous. It seems that a number of computer science schools are even using it as an official assignment. Unfortunately, this also means that the servers will be even more overloaded. We had way too few servers this year as the organizers seem to working with a very limited budget. They managed to secure an additional server sponsor in the form TotaalNet in the last couple of weeks, which made things go smoothly for the final leg but I hope that Google stumps up more cash for servers since their name still appears on the contest bannerhead anyway. Maybe they could get all those universities to kick in some money too?