DoC Undergraduates take part in Formicary Christmas Challenge

14 DoC undergraduates took part in a very successful Formicary Christmas Challenge: Java Pawn Race Tournament on Thursday 14th January.

On Thursday 14^th January the Department held a tournament for first year students, the Formicary Christmas Challenge: Java Pawn Race Tournament, organised by First Year Teaching Fellow Nicolai Stawingoa. 14 students took part, plus a number of others who were unable to get their code to work in time, with everyone enjoying pizza together before proceeding to the labs for the tournament.

The goal of the tournament was to write an AI that would be able to play a pawn race on a standard chess board and output moves. The game is played 7v7 pawns, and since the white player has the advantage of starting, the black player has the privilege of deciding which two pawns are taken off the board.

The winning students were:

• 1^st place- Inusha Hapuarachchi
• 2^nd place- Harjuno Perwironegoro
• 3^rd place- Alberto Spina. James Knight was a close semi-finalist, taking part in the third place match with Alberto.

The tournament consisted of a group stage and a knock-out stage. All semi-finalists received an Amazon voucher worth £50 (£100 for the winner) provided by our sponsor Formicary, a financial technology company founded by a DoC alumnus.

The winner's implementation comprised bit-representation for boards, multi-threading, iterative deepening, alpha beta pruning, null move pruning, and quiescent search. His code aimed to look ahead 10-18 moves, computing at different depths in parallel and returning the best result available when the time threshold was reached. The runner up chose a different approach, looking ahead fewer moves but employing more extensive analysis of the position, having devised a scoring system for blocked pawns, attacked-and-not-backed-up pawns, etc.

The event was very well received and a great success. Thank you to everyone who put so much effort into organising the event, particularly Nicolai, and our congratulations go to the winners!