Yes! You are encouraged to join, but you will may not be eligible for the cash prize pool. Separate prizing may be announced for non-students. You may still be eligible for hiring opportunities and digital certificates. Please stay tuned for announcements on our Discord.

The competition is intended to be fairly challenging at a university student level. For beginners in programming, we'll provide you with a step-by-step tutorial to help you get started with building your first AI.

The game will be a twist on our original 2-player Bomberman-like game called Bomberland. The new season will feature updated game rules and mechanics. These will be announced at the start of the competition. You can learn more about the previous season of Bomberland here.

The prize pool will be distributed amongst the top 4 teams, with higher-ranking teams taking a larger cut.

We'll be providing starter templates for Python 3. However, any setup that runs in a Linux docker container will work. The game communicates over websockets, so you'll be able to use any language as long as you are able to implement the communication layer in your language of choice (this is fairly advanced).

No, this challenge is all about your programming, problem solving, game theory, and analytical thinking skills. We've found previous submissions to be a mix of algorithmic as well as ML-based approaches. But if you've already got some skills in ML and think you can apply them in this challenge - go ahead!

We generally use the word 'team' to mean any 1 - 5 participants entering the tournament together. You absolutely can join the tournament on your own. All prizes are split between the 'team'. Once you join the community Discord group, you can use the 'looking-for-team' channel to find other people who want to team up.