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Comment by dlevine | Hacker News Reader

Congrats! I knew Aaron at Google, and he was one of the smartest engineers around.

He also built one of the coolest pieces of software I've ever seen (Robocraft). It was a Starcraft clone where users had to code up AIs for each of the units (and then those AIs battle each other). MIT uses it as the foundation for a programming competition that they run every January. I think it was done by him and one other person.

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Most of that software has been rewritten several times over now, but the competition lives on (it's called Battlecode now)! We actually open sourced a bunch of the code base last year if you're interested in checking it out [1].

Additionally, the competition has since been opened to outsiders so you can participate even if you're not at MIT. We never publicized that fact very well, but I imagine it would appeal to much of the HN crowd. I also recommend checking it out if you've got some time to kill [2].

[1] https://github.com/battlecode/ [2] http://www.battlecode.org

(https://www.battlecode.org/info/)

(http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...)

Looks amazing. I'd be interested to see what HNers could do with this.

Trying to make a competitive AI for Battlecode is uncannily similar to trying to create a successful startup (and much, much less intimidating.) Aaron deserves a lot of credit for starting it (the other founder is David Greenspan, who also did Etherpad with Aaron.)

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