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.