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Week #3 of the Rock Paper Azure Challenge ended at 6pm EST on 12/9/2011. That means another five contestants just won $50 Best Buy gift cards! Congratulations to the following players for having the Top 5 bots for Week #3: AmpaT choi Protist RockMeister ...read more

Rock, Paper, Azure (RPA) is back!   For those of you who have played before, be sure to get back in the game !  If you haven’t heard of RPA, check out my past posts on the subject .   In short, RPA is a game that we built in Windows ...read more

We had a GREAT time running the RockPaperAzure Grand Tournament Wednesday.  We had a total of 302 players from around the world, and the top players in the finals were: We saw some amazing strategies, and learned a lot along the way.  We intend ...read more

Just a quick tip for those in the Grand Tournament.  There are 2 very common reasons we’re seeing bots get rejected – we’ll call it the red text of death that appears when you submit a bot, but it fails code analysis.  If all you see is “ Bot ...read more

We’re back – this time with an International Grand Tournament in Rock, Paper, Azure .    So what’s new? First, we heard many folks loud and clear that they weren’t happy it was U.S. residents only.   So, now’s your chance – we ...read more

You’ve heard about cloud computing and already know it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread – and maybe you’ve already attended a Microsoft Azure Boot Camp or other event introducing you to the cloud and detailing the various parts of the Windows Azure ...read more

During a presentation the other day to the Charlotte ALT.NET group ,  I made a joke that Rock, Paper, Azure is doing something completely ridiculous: we invite people to write code and we’ll run it arbitrarily.  (Well, not really arbitrarily ...read more

In a previous post about locking in Rock, Paper, Azure, I said this somewhat offhand: In this case, there’s no reason to use such code in a bot. The only time you’d need to is if your bot has a static method/object reference, but that’s ...read more

Over the past few weeks, we (the dev team of Rock, Paper, Azure) have gotten to be best friends with our internal legal department.  It’s been an educational experience, and this is where things stand with Rock, Paper, Azure. When one player wins ...read more

For security and performance reasons, we often review what bots are doing and review any rejected bots to see how things are going.   When a bot is rejected, it is typically easy to spot the exact reason when looking at the code, but sometimes ...read more

In Friday’s webcast, I showed a quick ‘n dirty utility for testing a RockPaperAzure bot outside of the game server and even the Bot Lab. When we ran some of these tournaments in person, it was very difficult to get a good feel for your bot ...read more

We had a couple of great questions on RPA tournaments over the first week – I thought I’d clarify a few things here. International Players As many of you know, the main tournament (with prizes) is limited the US residents. This is for ...read more

If you’re interested in getting a Windows Azure account to play in Rock, Paper, Azure (RPA), there are a few options available to you, from least painful to most painful (in my opinion, anyway): Method 1 – Windows Azure Pass The way most people are getting ...read more

… but there are some changes to Rock, Paper, Azure we need to discuss based on our test week.   First things first:  I highly recommend you download the latest Bot Lab and MyBot project here .  For the most part, old bots bots will ...read more

We’ve had a few people ask about getting the following message when submitting bots: Bot contains invalid calls. Please review the official rules for more information. In short, this message means the bot didn’t pass the static analysis tests.  On ...read more

Over the past few days, we’ve gotten many requests from those outside the United States who would like to play Rock, Paper, Azure.  Some have even said, “I don’t care about the prizes, I just want to play!”   So what’s the deal? If we could ...read more

If you’re not sure what Rock, Paper, Azure (RPA) is all about, check out the website or look over some of my recent posts .   In this series of posts, I want to go into some of the technical nuts and bolts regarding the project. First, you can ...read more

I’m pleased to announce that we’re finally launching our Rock, Paper, Azure Challenge ! For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with Jim O’Neil and Peter Laudati on a new Azure event/game called Rock, Paper, Azure.  The concept is this:  ...read more