The NDSU student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (NDSU ACM) recently took second place in a prestigious Midwest programming competition. The group competed in “MechMania” at the annual “Reflections | Projections” ACM conference held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Oct. 7-9.

MechMania is a 24-hour artificial intelligence programming competition of which the NDSU ACM has been a perennial competitor.

Sponsored in part by the NDSU Department of Computer Science, the NDSU ACM took 10 students to the conference, including three MechMania teams of three students each.

This year, MechMania competitors developed artificial intelligence players for “Thrust Wars,” a game in which players must control their fleet of “Asteroids” style space ships and score points by gathering resources, building ships, refineries and bases while battling or destroying the other team’s ships, refineries and bases.

NDSU’s PiRho team of students Zechariah Andersen, Benjamin Bechtold and Justin Anderson took second place in a photo finish to a team from UIUC. Team members received an Amazon Kindle along with 100GB of space from Dropbox for life as prizes for placing second.

The other competing NDSU teams were team MasterControl of Ryan McCulloch, Nathan Ehresmann and Cesar Ramirez; and team Bobby Tables of Nathan Spanier, Lance Janssen and Joshua Tan.

For more details on NDSU ACM events, visit www.acm.ndsu.nodak.edu.