I’ve been very distracted recently due to my participation in the Google AI Challenge organized by the University of Waterloo and sponsored by Google. This is a programming contest in which participants each submit a bot that is capable of playing PlanetWars, a simple game based on the commercially-released game Galcon. I’ll probably confine the technical details and my own bot’s strategy to my Knights of the Cardboard Castle blog, but I thought it would interesting to look at some of the publicly available statistics.

Since I submitted my own entry, my wife and I have been scrutinizing the rankings on a fairly regular basis. It’s fun after all to see who’s doing the best and to know which countries they’re from. And seeing as how I’m Malaysian, it was only natural to want to know how well participants from neighboring countries might be doing. Keep in mind of course, that the contest only ends in December 2010, so the rankings are still in flux as new participants are still joining and entries are still being tweaked.

Anyway, here’s a ranking of the top countries, based on number of participants in the top 100 and how many they have. Note that I left out countries with only a single participant in the top 100 and this is out of a total of over 4,000 participants.

1. United States (22)
2. Russia (15)
3. Ukraine (9)
4. France (7)
5. Germany (6)
6. United Kingdom (4)
7. India (4)
8. Poland (4)
9. Spain (3)
10. Netherlands (3)
11. South Korea (2)
12. Canada (2)
13. Belarus (2)

Now, this is obviously skewed due to a number of factors. For example, there are probably more participants from the US and the UK because it’s a contest organized by a British university and sponsored by an American company. But all the same, two conclusions seem obvious to me:

• The former USSR has some awesome hackers.
• Asia is severely under-represented. I’d say the four from India is fairly par for the course given the size of the IT-industry in the country but only two South Koreans representing all of East Asia? Where is China, or Japan for that matter?

Since we are all such busybodies, here are some statistics for participants from East Asia:

• The contest treats Hong Kong and China as two separate countries. The highest ranked participant from China is somewhere in the 300s and China has a total of only three participants in the top 1000. The highest ranked participant from Hong Kong is at 137 at the time of writing and Hong Kong has a total of four participants in the top 1000.
• The highest ranked Japanese is at 208 at the time of writing and there are a total of eight participants in the top 1000. This is pretty disappointing really given the technology level of Japan and how many videogames the country makes every year.
• South Korea has a total of thirteen participants in the top 1000. All that Starcraft playing must really pay off!
• Singapore has only one participant in the top 1000 somewhere in the 500s.

Finally, the contest allows participants to state their affiliation which is usually a university or a company. It’s hard to get a good grasp of the top institutions this way, but as far as I can tell, two of the best performing institutions are Google itself and THQ, a game developer.

As for myself, I’m in the 500s and will likely stay there. I’ve tried to spread the word around through Facebook and on LYN, but so far no other Malaysians seem very enthusiastic about the project so I’m far and away in first place despite my total lack of education and experience in programming. As far as I can tell, the rest of the Malaysians are just using barely tweaked default bots.