On Saturday, October 8th, Jonathan Birch, Mike Grim, and Ross Mead represented the Department of Computer Science in MechMania XI, an AI programming tournament at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their team, known as BGM (Birch-Grim-Mead), took home second place out of sixteen teams in the double-elimination portion of the tournament. MechMania is part of the ACM's Annual Reflections | Projections Student Computing Conference, which is in its eleventh year.

Each MechMania XI team was given 18 hours to implement an artificial intelligence program capable of defeating the programs of other the contestants. The same programming specification was provided to each to team the night before the competition. This specification defined the parameters of the competition and the capabilities of each team's computerized agents. This year's competition had a medieval theme, which included castles, fighters, archers, and wizards. Units would battle each other while trying to locate a randomly placed "Mech", which could be delivered to the enemy team's base for an instant win.

Participating teams consisted of undergraduate and graduate students from schools such as UIUC, UIS, WashU, UMR, and NIU. Congratulations to Jonathan, Mike, and Ross for a job well done!