We’ve expanded our team a bit – the current team is:

• Ben Murrell – Visualization, Fearless Leader
• Steven Wallace – Client, Fearless Co-Leader
• Stephen Mues – Server
• Andrew Schrader – PR
• Brian Goldman – Concepts, balancing
• Kyle Steinert – Concepts, balancing
• Josiah Worcester – Client
• Alex St. John – Visualizer
• Josh Bohde – Server
• Sean Schmidt – PR

Yep, that’s 10 people – quite a jump from the last two semesters… but it’s a good thing. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us – we’ve already laid out all of the details for the game, now it’s just a matter of implementing all of them. We’ll also be dedicating more time to planning the actual tournament this semester – like we said before, we want a better Arena up and running when competitors arrive. We also want more competitors from more schools, which means we’ll be spending more time inviting schools out to the competition. Finally, we’re aiming to get some sponsorship for the event – perhaps t-shirts, food, or prizes. We’ll keep you updated as things progress!

We’ve already started work on the Spring 2009 game!

So far, the team is:

• Ben Murrell – Visualization, Fearless Leader
• Steven Wallace – Client, Fearless Co-Leader
• Stephen Mues – Server
• Andrew Schrader – PR
• Brian Goldman – Concepts, balancing
• Kyle Steinert – Concepts, balancing
• Gerald Holt – ???

We’ve already settled on a game idea – in record time too. Last time it took ~5 weeks, this time it took ~15 minutes. I have to say, the game idea is really sweet, and when it’s finished we should be able to get a lot of people to come compete. We haven’t seen anything like it in the genre of AI Tournament games… I wish I could tell you more,  but you’ll have to wait to find out!

We have several general objectives for this game, the first is that we want a 3D visualizer that is built into the client binary (as opposed to past competitions where the visualizer is a separate program). I’ll be working on this, and I’m going to be working with OpenGL and the SDL so we can remain cross-platform. We also want the client to have bindings for several languages – Steven is taking over this; he plans to implement the client in C, then provide bindings for Java, C++, and Python. Hopefully with more languages available, we’ll be able to pull in more competitors, and competitors from other schools as well. Our other big push is to make the tournament experience much better this semester – this means we’ll be putting more time into the Arena server, simplifying the process of hosting/joining games, creating an automatic upgrade process (so everyone doesn’t have to build on the same machine in order to get transparent updates to the client), having the game well balanced before the competition, and having a few staff AI’s to compete against from the beginning.

The Fall 2008 tournament went well – you can check out the game and results here.

The only bad thing (in my opinion) was that I had to leave for good at 4am to go to Pyro class for the rest of the weekend. Thanks to all of the teams that came out, and thanks for your suggestions for future games! We’re already working on integrating your suggestions into future games – be sure to check back for more details on next semester’s competition!

This is the new home for the Missouri S&T ACM AI team. We work on the games that are used for the MegaMiner AI Tournament.

The team and the AI tournament were originally created by Ben Murrell, with motivation provided by the current faculty co-advisor, Matt Buechler. We wanted to have something like UIUC’s MechMania so we could get local students involved (it’s hard to take everyone to Urbana-Champaign!).

The original team was formed at the ACM reformation meeting (Josh Eads’ idea – at the end of FS07 ACM underwent some big changes because we wanted to get people more involved and to get more people interested in ACM). It was originally supposed to be the “Events Committee” – the other committees formed that night were the projects committee (SIG-SODA, MAME Cabinet), some sort of PR committee, a MinerLAN committee, and a committee to form mini-conference, similar to Reflections|Projections. At this time, most of the committees have been reabsorbed into the ACM officers, or the general membership – but still now, the Events Committee lives on as the Missouri S&T ACM AI Team.

The original team had seven people on it, but when as time went by the team dwindled down to four members: Ben Murrell (El Capitan), Steven Wallace (Server Czar), Justin Voss (Client King), and Andrew Schrader (PR Lord). We started working on the game towards the end of 2007, and we held the first MegaMiner AI Tournament on April 25th and 26th, 2008.  Six teams submitted AIs to the tournament, though we had about 9 teams at the beginning of the competition.

We pulled some of our competitors into our team for the next semester – Stephen Mues and Gerald Holt. Unfortunately, Justin was on co-op at Anheuser Busch, so he wasn’t able to help out in the fall semester of 2008.  The rest of the team remained the same. We started working in the beginning of the semester, and held the second MegaMiner AI Tournament on November 6th and 8th, 2008. We had 18 people sign up prior to the tournament, and at the event ended up with 9 teams. About six teams submitted AIs to the tournament.