As in the previous year, computer science students on Prof Dr Carsten Kern's elective module ‘Project: Client AIs for Board Games’ (ZOCK) have once again come out on top against their fellow students from RWTH Aachen University: The AI programme they created for a complex extension of the classic board game Reversi defeated the opposing programmes by a clear margin.
The third and fourth semester computer science students developed AI programmes in this course, which finally competed against the programmes of the students from Aachen in a championship. The AI competition, co-initiated by Prof Dr Carsten Kern, has been running since 2015 and has enjoyed great popularity ever since.
This year, the competition was once again held on high-performance clusters at RWTH Aachen University's Chair 2 for Computer Science of Prof Dr Joost-Pieter Katoen. A total of 21 students from both universities competed against each other in teams of three between 31 July and 1 August 2024: five OTH teams and four teams from RWTH Aachen University qualified for the final from the two semi-finals. The two outstanding AI clients from OTH groups 04 and 05, created by Samuel Kroiß, Ludwig Schmidt, Maximilian Strauß and Thomas Hörmann, Hannes Weber and Philipp Zausinger respectively, didn't give any of the other AI opponents a chance. Their AI client took first and second place with 925 and 561 points respectively (out of a total of 6196) ahead of the third-placed team from RWTH Aachen University
