The first Realtime Worlds Student Programming Contest was held on 7th March 2009, with 31 students from a variety of Scottish universities taking part.

The contest was split into two parts: a pure algorithmic problem-solving part, and an interactive part where contestants wrote AI routines for a simple game and we ran them head to head with big-screen visualisation. The questions, and sample data, are included below. The question statements are all released under a CC licence.

Part 1

Part 1 allowed three hours for contestants to solve these problems:

• Chess.pdf; test data: chess.rar
• Circles.pdf; test data: circles.rar
• Pebbles.pdf; test data: pebbles.rar

Note that for pebbles, there may be many winning moves from a given position, so the test data does not give expected output. Instead, we have provided source code for a simple verification routine that can check the correctness of your output.

Part 2

The problem statement for part 2 is here: Spaceship.pdf. Source code for the visualisation and verification routines is here: Spaceship.rar. The visualisation is based on the XNA version of Asteroids.

This entry was posted on Monday, 16 March 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Press Releases.