Gades Siege

Gades Siege is a specially designed free software tool that provides a common environment where different strategies coded using rule-based expert systems compete against each other. The system models a square board in which players have a partial knowledge of the world (i.e., there is no “perfect strategy” to play the board-game). Using this application, the students can program and test their expert system rule sets against other rule sets or human players. After competing in a league, students can improve their systems before participating in a play-off tournament. This way, the students can develop the skill of critically analyzing the strategy they have implemented.

Additionally, besides programming a strategy, students have to read source code written by their classmates and bet a part of their grades on other teams. This way, they review source code written by other programmers, which is a very valuable skill in the professional world. At the same time, students that are not so proficient in coding are still rewarded if they can do a good analysis of the source code written by others by identifying the future winner of the competition.

The tool is available as open source on Github. The results obtained from the tool have been published in ITICSE12 (see the Publications page).