Jan 27, 2012 - Claremont, Calif. -

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

Windward Code War Trophy

“The future of technology is primarily software, and these students are some of the most brilliant programmers in the world,” said Dave Thielen P14, founder and CTO of Windward, the contest’s sponsor. “We figured this would be a fun contest between the top schools where the competition could be over programming instead of sports.”

The Windward International Intercollegiate Programming Championship begins at 10 a.m. The final game will run remotely, using a central server at HMC, and be webcast Saturday night.

Student teams will design an Artificial Intelligence player for a previously undisclosed computer game created by Thielen specifically for the contest. They have eight hours to write their program, test it and debug it. Then, the game runs with all the AI players competing at once. A winner is declared when a team’s player wins the game twice.

Teams will compete first at their home school level. The top two teams from each school will then run against each other in the final game for the prize of national programming champion. The champion team will receive a trophy.

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.

“HMC is now competing against schools such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and Stanford,” said Christopher Stone, associate professor of computer science. “The competition challenges both our students’ programming skills and their teamwork ability. Plus, it should be a fun way to spend a Saturday.”

Visit the contest page here.