In preparation for the next “London Java meetup”:http://web1.2020media.com/j/jez/javanicuscom/londonjava/, I’ve been playing around with “Robocode”:http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/robocode with a view to embarrassing myself in front of fellow coders. For those who don’t know, it was originally developed as a teaching tool by IBM – its a complete development environment for coding little Robots that try and blow other robots up, and its very fun in a “why is my robot doing that? Where is he going? Why won’t he fire, for the love of god, FIRE!” kind of a way. Hopefully Robocode will get a wider audience with the great news that IBM have “decided to opensource it”:http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/forum/robocode.nsf/current/76296EA3B19C41F092246E236222BC66?OpenDocument.
Or they won’t yet – “apparently”:http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/forum/robocode.nsf/current/990448567D8271246D13D1A191A50F19?OpenDocument that was a fake post, but IBM developer Mat Nelson is “working on it(nterested in opensource Robocode?)”:http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/forum/robocode.nsf/current/91022251A742C56E71C7678B16754504?OpenDocument.