Feb 01, 2012 - Claremont, Calif. -

Harvey Mudd College captured fourth place in an international code war competition Jan. 28 that pitted HMC students’ programming skills against those of top teams at MIT, Stanford and more than a dozen other universities.

“Although we didn't win this year, HMC was the only school with two teams good enough to reach the final round of eight,” said Christopher Stone, associate professor of computer science. “And, the students clearly had fun.”

HMC’s “League of SmashCraft,” which held the lead spot in the third semifinal, came in fourth in the final round with a total score of 421 points. Team “Trolololol” nabbed second place in the first semifinal and tallied 411 points in the final game, earning sixth place in the overall competition.

The Windward International Intercollegiate Programming Championship tasked teams with designing an Artificial Intelligence player for “Last Robot Standing,” a computer game created specifically for the contest. Faced with an eight-hour deadline, they had to write their AI program, test it and debug it. Then, the games began.

Teams competed first at their home school level. The top two teams from each school moved on to the semifinals to vie for the prize of national programming champion. Hundreds of teams participated in the contest, and HMC was the only school to have both of its top teams reach the final round.

The teams seized fourth and sixth place.

Hosted by the 5-C Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Chapter, the event was originally planned as a Claremont Colleges competition. However, it quickly swelled into a contest that included more than a dozen schools, including the University of Toronto.

View contest results here.