Space. The final frontier. Time of active colonization of the planets of solar system. Interplanetar corporations fight each other for control of rich resources of these distant worlds. This time Mars is an battlefield!

With technological advancements robots are more and more widely used in battles. Metal warriors know no fear and pain and immune to hazards of Mars' unforgiving environment. The corporations are actively gathering groups of young brilliant scientists to program an AI of the robots. Only those capable to create a better AI shall claim the victory...

Robowar is an educational game project in the fields of multi-agent systems, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence developed at the Supercomputer software department of ICM&MG SB RAS in cooperation with Parallel computing technologies departments of the Novosibirsk State Technical University and Parallel computing department of Novosibirsk State University.

The game simulates the war between armies of robots striving to conquer Mars. Each robot maintains its own state and is controlled by an individual AI. Robots of the same army share the same algorithms of AI and have to cooperate to beat other pretenders. Thus, this is the war of AI algorithms.

Students are invited to develop their AI algorithms and present them for a challenge at the battlefield. Thus students get introduced to the ideas of multi-agent systems and artificial intelligence. Technically, implementation of the algorithms is easy because it requires only one function in C++ or Angel Script language in the current version of the simulator. Thus, first year students can already take part in this project.

However, educational aspects of the project are wider. Advanced students can be offered the following tasks:

• parallel implementation of a game simulator either for SMP systems or clusters
• development and improvement of visualizing software
• development of enhanced game models
• integration of distributed simulator (Linux-based, for example) and visualizer (Windows-based)

Battle begins! Join!