Wow, that was fun. The live thrashing back and forth between the clients at the end was great.

While my code had no bugs, it turns out that the most important part of the AI is how it chooses to take coins from the middle. In my case, I was taking biggest coin value. In Kevin's case, he didn't have time to be tricky so he was taking from the bottom-up.

Bottom-up turns out to be better in a naive sort of way. Middle out, we both agree, is the best answer. Congratulations Kevin and Blaine. It was a lot of fun. May be I'll give it a go again next year :)

2nd place gave me a nice shiny new iPod. Actually, I'm sort of glad I didn't win 1st place - the $1000 prize can only be used to go to Camp Smalltalk - I have no idea when I would ever get to do that.