That time has come again! Worlds best programming contest is back!

Google AI challenge is back! (well, at least about to. Beta server is there and folks are already slugging it out!) Can feel the competition heat is already building up!

Last year competition (Planet Wars) was a tremendous success for this competition to catapult it into arguably the worlds best programming contest. My experience, misfortune and the way I compensated for it, is found in here.

This year competition is about building up and growing a colony of Ants. Ants have two major functions, spawning and fighting (killing enemy ants). In a 2D battlefield we get food randomly but fairly placed and continuously supplied in various locations. Players have to program their bots to compete for those food resources which will help them spawn more ants and then command your ant armies in battle to conquer the whole field! It's a multilayer game, meaning there are several players competing at the same time.

As in the last year, the API is very elegant and simply done. One could master it and deploy a sample bot in a matter of minutes! The game server is arranging a continuous tournament contesting bots all the time and one can see the games being played (like this one here!) and the ranking / leader boards in near real time! Can you imagine the thrill this can generate ? well, you can just find out!

After I entering the last year completion only in last few days and made to curse my fate, this year I have made a head start. You could see our bots fighting with worlds best!

This is lot of fun! Challenging and a dream challenge for a programmer who is up to it.

Why don't you give it a try! nothing to loose!!

Warning : This is very addictive and sometimes even more so than just playing a game. You would loose  weeks of your time hacking away clever ways to beat the other programs. Only consolation is your programming/analytical skills are going to get a definite boost!

See you in battle!

Online Games of a different kind - and for free !

We are developing an online gaming site!

People could challenge others and play games online, keep records, play and organize tournaments, play matches with selected opponents, replay their past games, pass their university exams, complete their office work etc.  It would be so much fun! (except for last 2 items in the previous sentence).

To make it even more interesting, there will be few AI driven computer players as well. With ratings, rankings leader-boards, records etc

What will be the difference of our site with other such online gaming sites in abundance ?

Well, there will be few :

1) Our site will not require users to install any additional plugins or other software to play. No flash, flex, java applets etc They will just work from a "vanilla" web browser  just out of the box! no hassle, very light weight and universal. Yea it really will work from everywhere even on browsers running on iPhone, Android, iPads etc

2) The games running on the site will not be just animated flash games where users are just required to time their mouse clicks/drags. We believe a computer game could and should do lot more than that! Our games would mainly be board and puzzle, they would have classic games as well as few home cooked one but all would require some series analytical/calculation and strategic thinking from the players. There would be AI computer players for each and every game! Typically these games would be good for brains (comes under the category of IQ Enhancers) while fun to play!

3) It would be Free to play. It would be fast, lightweight and will not bother your system or browser performance. No hassle!

Can we achieve all that at once? We believe yes! and very soon we all will be witnessing that and playing with each other!!

So, who would be paying.. where will the money comes from ?

There are few plans. We might go for few sponsored on site ads, or may be there will be a little "donate" sign with a picture of a hungry programmer (kidding) in a corner, or may be there will be even cooler fantastic feature set for subscribed users.

Or may be non of above!

We will also be developing mobile versions for games in the site which prove to become more popular than the others. (hopefully all of them!) Some of these mobile versions will be free for all to play while few others might appear in various app stores. If it looks like there are enough players who think it's worthwhile to buy those games from app stores then, I guess we don't need to put adds in our gaming site after all!

So in short, we will leave the money problem open for the time being, there are various options we could take judging by how things will proceed.

For the time being, let's just say that we could play some very interesting, addictive and challenging games online with friends, totally free!

In the next post we will have few sneak peaks on what those games exactly are... We would love to know what you think. Who knows, if you have a cool request to make, we might just be able to deliver that for you!

Like to play a game ?

(image source from : http://frenchboxing.blogspot.com)