Several computer science and computer engineering students at the University of Missouri-Rolla competed in the UMR computer science department’s fall 2004 Artificial Intelligence Tournament on campus in December.

Travis Service (left), and David Cape, winners of UMR’s 2004 AI Tournament.

Most of the competitors were students in Dr. Daniel Tauritz’s Computer Science 347 course, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence," but the competition was open to all students, staff and faculty. In the future, Tauritz hopes to invite area high school students to participate.

The tournament was based on the game of chess, says Tauritz. Tournament participants wrote computer programs in the C++ programming language using the artificial intelligence techniques learned in their course work.

There were 30 competitors in the tournament 15 human players and 15 computer programs.

"Players were randomly assigned," Tauritz says. "We had humans playing against humans, computers playing against computers and humans playing against computers." After the first round, each player was matched by skill level with a new opponent based on their scores. After seven rounds, the three players with the highest scores were declared winners.

Travis Service, a senior in computer science and mathematics from Kirbyville, Mo., won first place in the tournament as a human player. The computer player designed by Service took second place. David Cape, a graduate student in computer science from University City, Mo., won third place as a human player.