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Guide to The Imagine Cup; Project Hoshimi (AI) Competition

 As many of you will know the Imagine Cup is the worlds largest
technology competition for students. Microsoft runs the competition on
an annual basis and internationally around 130k students compete from
100 countries. The competition has nine categories each a competition
in their own right. The categories are: Software design  Embedded development  Game development  Algorithm  Information technology  Project Hoshimi (AI)  Photography  Interface design  Short film Each
competition has several rounds leading to a grand final which this year
will be hosted in Paris with top prizes as high as $15k. The
competition has been open since late August so now everyone in the UK
is back at university it's a great time to get a team together and
compete. The first rounds for all the competitions are designed to be
easy to compete in so take a look at the above links and get involved. To
get you started I have written a couple of guides to entering round one
of the Games Development and Project Hoshimi competitions. The guide to
getting started with XNA can be found here and the Project Hoshimi guide below... Guide to Project Hoshimi Project
Hoshimi is a programming battle where participants program strategy for
bots to follow. The strategy is then played out in a real-time 3D
environment. There are various scenarios and characters for which
scenarios will have to be programmed and an SDK is provided. For
round one of the competition the focus is on getting started and
strategy, little programming will be required and strategy will be
programmed through a graphical user interface. There will be a set of
criteria that must be completed by the bots and everyone who meets
these criteria and uploads their strategy file will proceed to round
two of the competition. In the SDK you will complete round one in
‘Discovery Mode’ Round two sees competitors get more involved
with the programming of the bots with an updated SDK and objectives. In
round two you will not get to see the map before your bots enter it so
yopu will have to program strategy that adapts. You will also have a
competitor’s team trying to complete the objectives at the same time as
you adding an extra level of complexity. In the SDK you will complete
round one in ‘Intermediate Mode’ All qualifiers are distributed
into pools by country and then an elimination format is used to
determine the top 3 teams per country. Those top 3 teams per country
are then all put together in one pool. An elimination format is used to
determine the top 6 teams to move on to the final round. The final
round will be held in Paris at the worldwide finals. The top six teams
from round two will battle it out in a twenty four hour competition! Getting Started Project Hoshimi
requires the installation of a special SDK which will allow you to
devise strategy for your nanobots and see the strategy played out live
in a 3D environment. Before you can install the SDK you
need to ensure you have Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 installed
on your machine. Windows Vista has the .NET Framework version 2.0
preinstalled but for Windows XP it will need to be downloaded here:Continue at Source.......  
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