My favorite entry in that competition was Fork Bot. The contestants were written in C, you see, and all rounds of play executed in the same process. Obviously

My favorite entry in that competition was Fork Bot. The contestants were written in C, you see, and all rounds of play executed in the same process. Obviously there's all kinds of ways you could cheat in this environment but Fork Bot struck me as especially clever. Fork Bot, on its turn, would fork() twice and return a different move in each of the three resulting processes. On its next turn, it would look back to the previous turn and see if it won. If not, it would exit(). So only the process where it won every round would survive... Though, it ran into a problem with one of the other cheaters: "Unfortunately, since all three moves lost to the Psychic Friends Network after the first turn, the program exited and the remainder of that match was declared forfeited." http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results2.html http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results2.html