New AI contest: suggestions?

[Sang-drax]

I disagree, while time may be a factor for some, there are lots of programmers with plenty of time. Look at the popularity of POTM contest (which are quite involved) or mathschallenge.net - eulur's challenge, if programmers can find time for those then surely they would for an "appealing" contest here.

This is not POTM, nor is it mathchallenge. It is still my fear that a hard contest (i.e. involving lots of time -- not like PJ's hard contests) would attract too few participants to make it interesting.

I'll create a poll in a while, with multiple options and tell people to only vote for a particular game if they seriously belive that they want to and will make a submission if a contest is created.

So far we have the following (games that I know the rules of):

• Black jack
• Hold'em
• Yahtzee

[PJYelton]

Also a bit of advertising wouldn't hurt... go to other programming forums like cpp-home, cppworld, etc. and announce the contest.

Advertising would certainly help, it all depends on how much of a big deal we would want this to be. I think its a mistake to assume that since contests work well on other boards they will work here. The site is very heavily tilted towards helping beginners instead of being a place where programmers discuss programming ideas, thus lacks the mass demographics that would find these type of challenges interesting enough to spend a lot of time on.

[itsme86]

Well, the reason I haven't been participating in contests lately is because they've been C++-specific. I don't do C++ so I don't do the contests. Make it so the person can enter in any language they want (within reason) and you'll get more participation.

[OH_HRVAT]

Yes, this would be a difficult contest. Yes, code for a good poker AI would be in depth and lengthy. But c'mon...this is an AWESOME idea, coiencedently, I am already working on an AI for poker...my goal is to use it to create a bot that will sit in a seat at an online poker room, and play for me 24-7 (obviously he will be set to play very conservatively, if you anyone doesnt know the easy way to make money online is to have the patience to wait for PREMIUM hands, and stick with them, and DONT chase...sorry, im a huge poker player...)

In all seriousness though, if anyone knows who Chris Ferguson (aka Jesus), who is a computer scientist, the logic and mathematical skills needed to effectively play poker and understand all of the outs, are essentially right down our alley...so lets do this!

[Sang-drax]

I've created a poll to choose the next contest.
http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showthread.php?t=65960

[PJYelton]

>>my goal is to use it to create a bot that will sit in a seat at an online poker room, and play for me 24-7<<

Umm... highly illegal...