CS NEWS

UBC Teams Take Top Two non-MIT Places at MIT's BattleCode Competition 2009

Vancouver, BC, June 12, 2009 - Two UBC teams placed 9th and 10th out of 400 teams in MIT's 2009 BattleCode Competition. MIT holds an annual AI coding competition called BattleCode primarily for its students every January. A parallel tournament runs from January to March and is open to all universities and colleges.

The competition takes the form of a real time strategy (RTS) game in which each team starts with a few units and their code executes inside the units or bots. The bots have to coordinate on tasks such as mining, creating more units, and attacking and defending against the opponent team without any outside guidance or assistance. 

The teams from MIT took the top 8 spots. Honourable mention was made to the top 3 non-MIT teams in which UBC took first and second place. Outside of MIT, UBC out-performed every other team, including teams from Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Waterloo. This is a big achievement considering there were around 400 teams registered and the only teams to beat UBC were from MIT, the competition host.

The results can be seen here: http://battlecode.mit.edu/2009/info/glory

The team members for the team "Bad Meme" which took 1st place among the non-MIT teams are:

Dan Ballard: UBC 3rd year undergraduate Computer Science student

Robert Hausch: UBC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate

Shaun Evans: Langara College Computer Science graduate and UBC Computer Science student as of September 2009

The team members for the team “KeepItSimple” which took 2nd place among the non-MIT teams are:

Andrew Tjia: UBC 5th year undergraduate Computer Science student

Patrick Nguyen: UBC 2nd year Masters Computer Science student

Martin Lau: UBC 3rd year undergraduate Computer Science student

Byron Knoll:  UBC 5th year undergraduate Computer Science and Cognitive Systems student

The UBC Department of Computer Science is among the top Computer Science Departments in Canada, recognized internationally for excellence in research and teaching with a conscious focus on interdisciplinary programs. The Department, consisting of 54 faculty, 200 graduate students, and 800 undergraduate students, encourages diversity both within its community and areas of study, and plays a leadership role in outreach activities to champion the understanding and integration of Computer Science into all aspects of society.