I do remember back in the day playing AT Bots, it was a similar concept, only you would write the bots in assembly, which was kind of fun, because on top of the strategy, you also had to figure all the ways to profile your code. Like for instance bit shifting instead of dividing, and such. You had to keep the code light because the speed of your bot directly correlated to the how fast the code would be executed. So, each processor cycle counted towards making you faster, but speed up too much by cutting down your code, and your bot would get dumber.<p>It would be interesting to see a game where only the API for the bot is exposed, and the actual computation takes place on a separate machine (or same machine, but separate processor). That way you can experiment with all kinds of languages, or even possible hardware combinations. For competition your code would be loaded on a VM instance or a physical machine which has identical characteristics to all the other competing machines, and you go at it. This way you are not limited to a given language or a set of libraries, and can really explore all the possibilities.
Looks fun!<p><pre><code> > What are the supported programming languages?
Java and Scala.
</code></pre>
Oh. Nevermind.<p>What's the most interesting version of a competition like this which doesn't place restrictions on implementation language?
While some of it is open to non-MIT students, it looks like to continue through to the finals you need at least 50% MIT students on your team.<p>Should be fun anyway.