Back to Blogging with a vengeance ?

Well, not quite. I have an unfinished business to settle down first, so please bare with us. Apologies for failing to post anything for some time now...

However, we have not wasted time doing entirely nothing in last month or so. For one, we are doing not too badly at the Google AI competition .

Current ranking page is in here.

Secondly, our long promised online free gaming site is just around the corner! You can already have a glimpse at the Araaya web site. Official launch will happen really soon too!

Thirdly, we have done some porting of our games into Android platform lately and doing same for iPhone. For this we got 2 phones, an iPhone 4 and a Motorolla Atrix. We have been playing with these 2 great phones lately which are easily the best in their categories at present, that I thought it would be useful for few to write a review and a comparison on them.

My last post about a similar subject (about Toyota Prius) was welcomed by many and judging by comments have helped few people... so probably I should do that more. After all, how often do we bloggers get a chance to actually help someone, (except for helping readers to kill their time) :-)

So, that (on iphone and Android) would probably be our next post. Meanwhile, some of interesting games from the AI competition can be found in this link. I'm regularly update that page with game links. Stay tuned....

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!