I will start by saying, if this is the wrong place to share things like this - I am sorry to bother you. But I hope and think some of you might find this as a fund and interesting challenge.

So I am an old-time-lurker, as I have found many great posts here with answers to questions I have Googled in regards to wiring AI - and I thought this could be a great place to share an small compo I have going at the moment, where the goal is to create an artificial intelligence that beats everyone else. I guess many of you have already hears of challanges like "RoboCode" - which was the basis of my game. The concept and idea is verry much based on Ants AI Challenge. And you will see many similarities - to such an extent that some of the same approaches might work here aswell. But with the few extra changes I hope to offer a bigger variety in implemented strategies.

This competition has also been posted on 2 norwegian only forums, where I am quite active - and I do not plan to post this on any other forums. So the participants are restriced to members from those 3 places.

The competition
Deadline: 2014-08-18
Languages/platforms: JVM(Java, scala...), .NET (VB, C#, F#), Python, NodeJS, Ruby. C++ and C
Deliverymethod: A PM on this forum with a link to the source-code. (no compiled code).
Source-code: https://github.com/etse/AI-compo-strategic-war

Rules

• Common sense. If you think you break the rules you might be.
• No libraries outside of the standard libraries for you language of choice. The only exception is JSON-libraries for languages with no good implementation in their standard libraries. (so GSON for Java is allowed).
• No communication through networking with anything but the game-server.

Tournement format
The format of the tournement will a standard elimination cup. Depeneding on number of participants I will have run battles with 2-4 players in free-for-all format. With a best of 3 format, using some tournament-only maps that will not be shared. (so the AI will have no knowledge of the map-layout before the finally). The top-players from each match will progress further in the cup. This will continue until we have only 2 participants left - which will face of in a 1v1-battle.

During the finally I will run all the clients locally on my computer, which has decent specs, with the server running on another computer on the same LAN. The AI has to consider that it does not know how much resources will be avalible - and that it will compete for such resources with other AI's aswell.

The finally will be recorded and uploaded on youtube for everyones entertainment

Problem description
The objective is to create an artificial intelligence that can play the specified game as strategic as possible. As the competition goes on bugs in the server might be fixed, and libraries for different languages might be created by either the author or any of the participants. So keep your eyes open for any updates in the repository.

The game is turn-based and plays out on a simple grid that wraps around on the edges. The means that any unit walking across the top of the map will appear at the bottom.

The bot will get feeded information visible by his units each turn, and should respond with his commands for all his units. In order to win the game it is important to make sure that all your units work together - and a strategic tips: like in most RTS-games establishing map-control is the easiest way to win.

The 2 main concepts of the game are:

• Collect food to spawn new units.
• Hunt down and destroy enemy spawners.

Along the way you will meet enemy units, when this happend you have to choose if you want to fight or flee. In situations where you end up fighting them the war-turns is resolved using the an implementation of majority-wins that allows for flanking. For more details read the game specifications.

More information and source code can be found here:
https://github.com/etse/AI-compo-strategic-war