You can also play against a dumbed-down Javascript version of the bot. It only spends a few milliseconds searching for a move rather than a whole second, and its move evaluator isn't as smart -- but at least a human has a chance of beating it and the code is very simple: http://a1k0n.net/code/tron.html

Here's the post mortem by the winner of the subsequent AI contest: http://quotenil.com/Planet-Wars-Post-Mortem.html

There is supposed to be a new version of this contest coming up soon, although it seems to be temporarily stalled as the main developers are busy with other things.

You can find the beta here: http://aichallengebeta.hypertriangle.com/

............says the guy currently kicking everyone else's tail.

(nice work by the way)

Looks like the old AI Contest site ( http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/rankings.php ) has been hacked. The "Google AI Challenge" header links to a random online game site)

I've notified those in charge of the site. Thanks for pointing that out!

Thanks, looks fixed now.

It is now located at http://ai-contest.com/ although it hasn't been updated for the latest challenge (Ants, which hasn't started yet).

All the YouTube vids are broken because the account has been closed. How odd.

hacked, or monetized?

In my experience, most universities forbid the monetization of sites that they host.

I'm going with hacked.

It seems likely that someone involved with the contest is trying to use it for free advertising. Look at the "About" page on that flash app, the person apparently lives in Waterloo, and his email has "uwaterloo" in it.

This is really interesting, thanks for the submission.

It also highlights just what you need to compete in these contests - raw programming skill, plenty of algorithmic knowledge, the ability to come up with clever heuristics and the desire to try absolutely anything to improve the quality of those heuristics. Seeing the process behind that was very enlightening.