Women in Computing Sciences (WiCS) and the Husky Game Development Enterprise (HGD) are excited to announce the results of the 8th annual BonzAI Brawl programming contest on Saturday April 11, 2015. Both groups put in hundreds of hours to develop the game and make the Brawl a success. More information about the event is available at: http://bonzai.cs.mtu.edu/
BonzAI is an day-long programming contest where small teams of students have eight hours to write software to compete in a custom-built competitive multiplayer game. At the conclusion of the event, teams watch their programs “brawl” against each other to determine which is the most capable. BonzAI student organizers have been working since September to develop the game and infrastructure for the event.
This year BonzAI is hosted over 50 teams and over 110 students from multiple departments across Michigan Tech’s campus, Northern Michigan University, and high-schoolers from the Copper Country Programmers club. Additionally, teams will participate remotely from Western Michigan University.
After 8 hours of programming, each team’s AI was run against all other teams in a 3-on-3 round-robin format to get an initial ranking of the teams (over 18,000 matches run). The final tournament structure consisted of two parts. First, using the initial ranking a ladder (or king-of-the-hill) tournament was run starting with the lowest ranked teams with the winner advancing to compete with the next ranked teams. The top 9 teams then competed in an elimination tournament to determine the final top three teams.
In third place was Grayson Briggs, Jesse Moore, and Keith Atkinson for team “Jesse’s Girl”; team members are first-year computer science students at Michigan Tech. In second place was Ethan Novak, John Novak, and Mike Grimes, team “The Last Pizza Dogs”; team members are 4th year computer science and a graduate mathematics student at Michigan Tech. In first place was Andrew Shirtz and Justin Syria, team “Conways Claim of Life”; team members are senior computer science and mathematics majors from Northern Michigan University. The final match was very close with scores of 943, 1071, and 1097 respectively.
The final match can be viewed on Youtube.
BonzAI Brawl sponsors include: Lasalletech (Camerontec Group), Jackson National Life Insurance Company, ControlTec, J.J. Keller & Associates, Inc., Humana, Epic, and UPPCO.