Results for UCSD Spring 2006 Programming Contest


This years software battle bot contest consisted of teams using an API to battle with space ships for dominance of the galaxy called Code Invaders. Five to six teams competed at a time, and each team started off with a mother ship and 3 drone ships. The ships could consume energy by firing on other teams ships to gain points and to reduce the energy of the other ships. The ships could also gather energy throughout the galaxy, and beam energy to help re-energize the mother ship or drones that may be lost in space without power. They can also beam their energy to their home world for even more points when the game ended.

There were 55 undergraduates competing this year comprising of 31 teams (some competed as a team of 2 people and others as an army of one). During the first 5 hours, the students programmed their space ships using the CodeInvader API. They then tested it locally on their machine, and in a public practice contest. After all the final Software Bots were submitted, a qualifying contest was run where all of the teams competed 5 times for the top 18 spots for the semi-finals. During the semi-finals the 18 teams competed 5 times each, and the top 6 teams in terms of total points went on to the finals, where they competed 5 times for the top 6 prizes.

The winning honors go to Arjay Waran

Thanks goes to Mike Dini of the The Dini Group for providing the prizes, food and drinks. The software environment was provided by IBM. Michael Van Biesbrouck and Michael Vrable deserve a huge amount of praise for setting up, running the software for the contest, and making the enhancements to the environment. This was a huge amount of work! Additional thanks go to Geoff Voelker, Jeremy Lau, Nakul Verma, William Matthews, and Michael Taylor for also helping organize and set up the contest.

Top 10 Finishing Teams for the Finals were:

Place	Team Members
-----	----------------------	      
  1	Arjay Waran
  2	Siavosh Aghassy and Mark Baune
  3	Tom Maddock
  4	Erik Buchanan and Kowalczykowski
  5	Xu Chu Lin and Wen Qiu
  6	Elizabeth Smit and Alexandri Zavodny
  7	Allen Lee
  8	Tam Le and William Seto
  9	Lukas Jai Clary and Mark Pirkle
  10	Tamara Denning and Simone McCloskey