Students compete to create game-playing bots in weekend competition

Sixty U-M student programmers spent 24 hours on September 30 and October 1 designing and optimizing intelligent game-playing “bots” as part of an innovative contest sponsored by Barracuda Networks and CSE. The bots were designed to compete and win the Milton-Bradley card game Rack-O.

The students, in teams of one to four, spent about 20 hours designing and improving their bots. The event culminated in a three-hour final tournament between the bots to determine the winning programmers. Of the 60 entrants, 51 competed on teams in the final tournament. The winning teams were:

1st place: msg555
Team members: Mark Gordon

2nd place: Taiwan
Team members: Yi-Chin Wu, Chih-Chun Chia, and Shang-Pin Sheng

3rd place: BestMac
Team members: Guoxing Li, Zhongshu Jin, and Lin Hao Peng