What's more fun than playing a computer game? Writing a program to play a computer game!

The 6.370 Robocraft programming competition during IAP is a unique challenge that combines battle strategy and software engineering. In short, the objective is to write the best player program for the computer game Robocraft.

[Photo]
The crowd at the Final Tournament.

The 2005 Final Tournament took place on January 29 and was a great success. The enthusiastic audience, filling 10-250, was treated to gripping battles between the finalist teams. In all respects, it was the biggest 6.370 ever.

We would like to thank our sponsor companies for their support, without which the competition would not have been possible. We would also like to thank the developers and contestants alike for their zeal and hard work throughout the competition.

Congratulations to this year's top teams!

1st
Place
 Team014 Clifford Frey, James Roewe
 
2nd Team022 Ian Caines, Thomas Lam, Hugh Robinson
3rd Team069 Adam Donovan, Matt Papi
 4th Team097 Stanley Wang, Kevin Wang, Paul Yang
 5th Team015 Drew Houston
 6th Team111 Alexey Radul, Josh Weaver
 7th Team063 Jenny Chan, Joel Fernandez, Bill Jacobs
 8th Team087 Jianlong Tan, Kah-Seng Tay, Kah-Keng Tay
[Robocraft screenshot]
The Robocraft game in action.

Robocraft, developed for 6.370, is a real-time strategy game. Two teams of robots roam the screen collecting resources and attacking each other with different kinds of weapons. However, in Robocraft each robot functions autonomously; under the hood it runs a Java virtual machine loaded up with its team's player program. Robots in the game communicate by radio and must work together to accomplish their goals.

Teams of one to three students enter 6.370 and are given the Robocraft software and a specification of the game rules at the beginning of IAP. During January, each team develops a player program, which will be run by each of their robots during Robocraft matches. At the end of the month, the players are pitted against each other head-to-head in a tournament. The final rounds of the tournament are played out in front of a live audience, with the top teams receiving cash prizes.