BotWars Grand Finale

Description

BotWars is an inter-university AI competition organized by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Student Branch Chapter of the Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT). As a new flagship initiative of the chapter, it was designed to increase engagement with and awareness of the chapter. Participants attempted to create the best strategies for various card game bots, which then competed head-to-head to determine the winning team. By applying AI, game theory, and algorithmic thinking to competitive card games, the competition showcased the practical value of intelligent decision-making. Following the introductory workshop, the online qualifying round was held, in which more than 25 teams developed and submitted bots for the card game German Whist. The round was conducted in a round-robin format, with each team competing against every other team. Each win was awarded one point, and the team with the most points was ranked highest. To minimize the influence of random card distributions, each matchup was played multiple times. The top-performing teams advanced to the grand finale. The final day of the competition consisted of two rounds. In the first round, participants developed bots for the card games Spades and Piquet, which competed in pairwise matchups within a round-robin tournament to determine the top eight teams advancing to the next round. The final teams then competed in a Poker tournament. The three teams with the highest overall average winnings were declared the winners of the competition, with winnings averaged across 16 tournament runs. Team Calit from IIT was crowned champion, with Team RootBotZ from SLIIT placing second and Team R2D2 from IIT placing third. The finale showcased the strategic thinking and technical ability of the participating teams. To ensure fairness and transparency, the tournament code and logs were shared with all participating teams, and any disqualifications or changes were explained to participants while the event was live. All teams used the official BotWars GitHub repository ( https://github.com/ua16/botwars-games ) to access the game code and to develop and submit their bots. Overall, BotWars provided university students with a practical platform to apply AI concepts and strategic decision-making, to test their bots against those developed by other teams, and to engage with peers across universities.