Reasons to compete in this year’s Battlecode programming competition at MIT

> "If you love programming, games, and competition, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have" As both a past competitor and someone who's been following the current game, I can't stress this enough, especially if you're the kind of person who likes to think for a long time to come up with novel approaches to problems.

As a contestant -- it's quite satisfying to be a step ahead of the crowd and watch other teams copy your strategy.

As a spectator -- watching the metagame evolve is exciting.

Because the game is brand new every year, there's a fast-paced metagame that the clever contestants get to define. It really brings me back the early days of starcraft, when the unit synergies were not well defined and players were theorycrafting new build orders all the time!

I'd encourage students to compete, even if your best bots just run away from their enemies. My buddy and I actually used Battlecode as our final project in our AI course. We worked as a team and then had a mini competition between ourselves using different techniques (his was focus on resources, mine seek and destroy).

Even if you feel underwhelmed going against MIT students taking it as a class, smaller schools still get recognition for participation. There is no correct solution; I think '08's winner just mass spawned tanks instead of running any type of strategy (he did test different set-ups and that was ultimately the best).

Finally, like the post suggests, its a great thing get experience with and if you are recognized in anyway (even Honorable Mention) is something nice to slap on the ol' resume.

Feynman once said, speaking of the merits of seeking inspiration from experiments rather than isolated theory, "The imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of man."

Riffing on this idea, the imagination of a human opponent (even when expressed as an algorithm) is far greater than the possible counterstrategies you will imagine yourself when inventing your own system. Having a motivated, intelligent, competitor actively probing your designs for weaknesses rapidly teaches one about the extent to which your expectations for what a given design will do match up to reality in the wild.

Competing in Battlecode was one of the best things I've ever done. Yes, it's great experience. Yes, you'll become a better programmer. Yes, it's a lot of fun.

But you learn things about yourself. Battlecode was my first love. It was the first code I wrote that I really poured myself into. The hunger for victory, the desire for perfection, the frantic last-minute hacks and patches...a lot of emotion goes into this competition, and I was not expecting that. I was an unmotivated, procrastinating slacker in high school. After doing Battlecode I saw what I had in me. I saw that I really could work, and work hard. I could work hard and love it! That has been life-changing for me.

I cannot recommend this competition enough. Participate, put everything you have into it, and Battlecode will give back.

I would love to attend to such an event but i am neither a MIT student nor living in the US (i am living in Germany). I wonder if there are more competitions like this but open for all. If no formal competition, i would really like to see games like these. :)

Funny enough one of the sponsors of Battlecode is https://amplitude.com , the founders of which won in 2009 and 2010.

Is the actual battlecode execution engine available for someone to try? It seems like a nice project to set up a open battlecode server..

Post for last year competition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022167

Just in case, like me, you fail to notice it last year. ;)

I... don't get it. Why don't respectable hackers boycott MIT because of Aaron's death? They never apologized AFAIK.