Abnormal programming *

The AI Cup community and Mail.ru Group in collaboration with Codeforces.com invite you to the real battle! Get ready for the sleepless nights and calloused hands — take part in Russian AI Cup, which is one of the most challenging and vivid artificial intelligence programming competitions in the world. Believe us, managers of this madness did their best to create the game you'd want to play.

To become part of the competition, you need Internet access, computer, creativity, and enthusiasm for being a part of this extraordinary Cup. By the way, you might need some coffee. Welcome!

Known now as a «motherboard speaker», or just «beeper», PC Speaker has been introduced in 1981 along with the first personal IBM computer. Being a successor of the big serious computers for serious business, it has been designed to produce very basic system beeps, so it never really had a chance to shine bright as a music device in numerous entertainment programs of the emerging home market. Overshadowed by much more advanced sound chips of popular home game systems, quickly replaced with powerful sound cards, it mostly served as a fallback option, playing severely downgraded content of better sound hardware.

«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retro computing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more.

StarCraft: Brood War. This game means so much to me! And to many of you, I guess. So much, that I wonder if I should even give a link to its page on Wikipedia or not.

Once Halt sent me PM and offered to learn Rust. Like any ordinary people, we decided to start with hello world writing a dynamic library for Windows that could be loaded into StarCraft's address space and manage units.

The following article will describe the process of finding solutions and using technologies and techniques that will allow you to learn new things about Rust and its ecosystem. You may also be inspired to implement a bot using your favorite language, whether it be C, C++, Ruby, Python, etc.