> Nostradamus was written by Tim Dierks, a VP of Engineering at Certicom, who has a lot of expertise in cryptography. The program defeats the optimal player by reverse-engineering the internal state of the random() generator, which he states "was both easier and harder than I thought it would be". To be sporting, it then plays optimally against all other opponents.
> Fork Bot was based on an idea that Dan Egnor came up with a few minutes after hearing about the contest. Since "library routines are allowed", his elegant solution was to spawn three processes with fork(), have each one make a different move, and then kill off the two that did not win. This was implemented by Andreas Junghanns in about 10 lines of code. Unfortunately, since all three moves lost to the Psychic Friends Network after the first turn, the program exited and the remainder of that match was declared forfeited.
> The Psychic Friends Network is a truly hilarious piece of obfuscated C, written by Michael Schatz and company at RST Corporation. Among other things, it uses an auxiliary function to find good karma, consults horoscopes, cooks spaghetti and (mystic) pizza to go with various kinds of fruit, #defines democrats as communists, and undefines god. We're still trying to figure out exactly what it is doing with the stack frame, but we do know that it never scores less than +998 in a match, unless it is playing against a meta-meta-cheater.
> The Matrix was written by Darse Billings, who holds the prestigious title of "Student for Life", and recently started the PhD programme at the University of Alberta. The RoShamBo program defeated every opponent with a perfect score, based on the simple principle "There is no spoon".
> Since The Matrix is also the tournament program, it has complete access to all other algorithms, data structures, and output routines, and is therefore unlikely to ever be overtaken. As a result, this category is hereby declared to be solved, and thus retired from future competitions.