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• February 29, 2020

• Unfortunately I have decided to stop running ranked matches for this site. I will also disable new submissions. This is because the cost of hosting this site is expensive and it doesn't get much traffic. By disabling ranked matches, I will be able to convert this site to free hosting and keep it running indefinitely.

• December 5, 2012

• I recently released a new site called Laservex. It is a HTML5 puzzle game based on reflecting lasers. You will notice it has a lot in common to this site (such as the visual appearance and the competition style) - I encourage you to try it out.

• June 9, 2012

• We have decided to deprecate the unranked match feature. Unranked matches have been using a lot of computational resources (causing the website to exceed resource limits). You can use rpsrunner.py to run unranked matches locally on your computer.

• April 29, 2012

• We discovered a clever submission which used an exploit to unfairly disqualify its opponents. We have updated our system to prevent the exploit. Since we don't have an easy way to identify which programs have been unfairly disqualified, we have resurrected *all* programs in the graveyard.

• February 8, 2012

• Ranked matches have been re-enabled (but at a very slow rate to avoid charges from App Engine).

• November 7, 2011

• Unfortunately Google App Engine has increased the pricing model of their service. To prevent the site from going over its quota limit, I will have to disable all automatic ranked matches. Hopefully I will eventually figure out a way to enable them again. :(

• August 16, 2011

• We recently tried running a contest between the top entries on the leaderboard using the rpsrunner.py script. Here are the results. Congratulations to dllu with his winning "Centrifugal Bumblepuppy 4" entry!

• June 27, 2011

• We have released a Python script to allow you to play RPS bots against each other locally on your computer. This script should also make it easier to develop new entries to submit to this site. A link to the script has been posted to the submit page.

• June 19, 2011

• The website has a new look!

• June 14, 2011

• Up until now the leaderboard rankings have been determined using the Elo rating system. Some properties of Elo are not ideal for this type of contest. Today I have switched to an experimental new ranking system based on the average win ratio of each program. The average is weighted more heavily towards recent matches. Please send an email if you have comments about the new ranking system - if this system turns out to be worse than the old one I will revert back to Elo.

• June 12, 2011

• Some clever programmers figured out how to seed the random number generator of their opponent. This allows them to make perfect predictions when the opponent is trying to play random moves! This type of exploit should now be fixed - each player now has an isolated random number generator.

• June 8, 2011

• Some users have given feedback that it can be difficult to find a program on the leaderboard after making a submission. Based on this feedback I have added search functionality to the leaderboard page. It is now possible to search for a specific program or author name.

• May 26, 2011

• A new feature has been added to allow human players to compete in unranked matches against any AI on the leaderboard.

• May 25, 2011

• Since some of the bots on the leaderboard have started becoming CPU resource hogs, fewer ranked matches can be run with the available computational resources. I have decided to enforce a strict CPU usage limit of five seconds for all matches. This new CPU limit should increase the resources available to allow more ranked matches to be run. Since many of the current AIs will exceed this CPU limit, a new "graveyard" section has been added to the website. Any AI that exceeds the CPU limit will be automatically disqualified and archived in the graveyard section.

• May 22, 2011

• The website has been shutdown after exceeding the resource limits again. Since it seems like this could be a recurring problem, I have changed the way ranked matches are performed. Instead of allowing users to perform ranked matches, all ranked matches will now be performed by an automated system based on available computational resources. This should eliminate the problem of exceeding resource limits. In addition, it will be harder to cheat the leaderboard rankings because you can no longer influence who your opponents will be. I will be resetting all player statistics to zero matches so that nobody has an unfair advantage in the new rating system.

• May 22, 2011

• After over 50,000 page loads yesterday, the website shutdown because it exceeded its resource limits. This website is currently hosted in the *free* category of Google App Engine, so it has limited computational resources. The resource quotas get reset every 24 hours at midnight (Pacific time). I encourage people to avoid spamming ranked match requests - playing thousands of matches won't have a significant effect on your long-term leaderboard ranking!

• May 21, 2011

• The website has been launched! It has been an exciting debut. There have already been over 20,000 page views and 50 AI submissions. Within a few hours of being launched somebody also hacked the website. They used javascript injection to redirect users to another site. The exploit was possible because I forgot to escape HTML tags when displaying information about a submission (the exploit is no longer possible). The next feature I plan to implement will be to allow human players to compete in unranked matches against any AI.