BonzAI Brawl 2013 was a great success with over 170 participants which included faculty, Michigan Tech students, Northern Michigan University students, alumni, and people from local industry. This year, participants implemented Java programs which gave artificial intelligence to farmhand characters. The farmhands rounded up ducks and eggs for money while avoiding slipping on mud. After a breakfast and orientation, everybody had around 8 hours to write their programs in teams ranging from 1 to 3 people. The event used all of the major computer labs in Rekhi hall. After the programming session was completed, each team’s submission faced a competency test and then competed against every other submission to preliminary rank them. Everybody got to see their programs compete against at least one other program in a “brawl” in the evening. Michigan Tech students from Team Hawkward (Christopher Wallis, Eric Zimmer, Corey Bilski) won the event and took 0th place. MTU students Lazor Beans (Nick Lanam, Kaylee Edwards) took 1st, and Neptunia (Kayla Egner, Matt Menze, Larry Flint) from NMU took 2nd. The team from industry sponsor LasalleTech would have advanced to the semifinals but they bowed out to allow students to take the top places.
- Event website: http://bonzai.cs.mtu.edu/
- Photos: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.888382746981.1073741831.29005122&type=1&l=25575d1a36
- Video of final match: https://vimeo.com/64113929
- Video of orientation: http://vimeo.com/64113930
- Video of gameplay: http://vimeo.com/64113763
- FOX TV6 Coverage: http://www.uppermichiganssource.com/neighborhood/story.aspx?id=884837
- FOX TV6 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o53Yyq5SThQ&feature=player_embedded
- Mining Gazette: http://www.mininggazette.com/page/content.detail/id/529521/Tech-hosts-artificial-intelligence-competition.html?nav=5006
- NMU coverage: http://math.nmu.edu/Students/computer_science/programming_contests/BonzAIBrawl/2013%20Brawl/2013bonzai.html