RPS Competition!!!

Anyone else as psyched as I am??? No??? Huh, thats weird. Well anyway, I have decided to host my own rock, paper, scissor tournament! Still not interested? How about if I told you that you had to program a RPS bot to play the game against another persons RPS bot? If you're still not interested then there's no hope for you... If you are interested though, then read on!

...The Idea

So after my daily reading of the Official Google Blog on Nov 25th, (maybe it was the student blog???) I saw that the University of Waterloo had hosted a rock paper scissors programming challenge. I was extremely interested. I looked over all of the sample code, and I read a few articles about logic that can be used in the game. This was my sole inspiration to hold my own tournament. As of this evening, I will begin to write the Java bot that will moderate the game. Hopefully I can finish the bot by the 23rd of Jan, so that I can make a website for it and begin to advertise around the UMD College Park Campus.

...The Competition

Then a week or two into February I'll open up registration so people will be able to test their robots. And every other day, I'll run the competition on all of the submitted code. For three weeks this will continue, and people will be able to tweak and re-upload their code to make it smarter. Then on the final weekend, (probably Saturday) I will host a big RPS party and everyone can submit their final programs and see who comes out to be the winner. I'll eventually think of prizes that the top three or so will win.

I hope that other people are as excited as I am about programming RPS artificial intelligence. I think it will be very difficult. As it gets closer to February, I will try to post some basic RPS logic so that people can get an idea of how to go about programming this.

Thinking about doing this competition also has me thinking about other AI competitions that I could run. If you have any ideas lemme know in the comments.