OSU student writes code to win 2nd place in national contest

By MARY ANN ALBRIGHT
Gazette-Times reporter

Bryant Brownell likes to compete. More than that, he likes to win.

“Who doesn’t?” he asked, standing near the dozens of chess trophies he and his four siblings have amassed over the years.

Brownell, 20, lives in Corvallis and attends Oregon State University, where he’s a freshman majoring in computer science.

He was homeschooled, but winter trips to Tucson, Ariz., gave him the chance to play chess on the Catalina High School team. Last year, they took first place in the national high school chess championship.

He’s also a competitive Dance Dance Revolution player. He estimates he’s in the top 20 video game dancers in Oregon. In May, he’ll face other master video arcade dancers at a tournament in Eugene.

But Brownell’s latest triumph was taking second place in a nationwide computer programming contest.

A colleague at Hewlett-Packard Co., where Brownell interned last summer, encouraged him to enter Symantec Corp.’s competition, in which entrants had one week to program an artificial life-form that could thrive in a virtual world.

Brownell has been writing computer code for 10 years, but he’s more used to java and c++ language than the “archaic” assembly language he used in the Symantec contest.

The challenge was to write a program for a robot, instructing it to navigate a map in search of food. It needed to use some of the food for energy to move around, but some of it was deposited at various spots to earn points.

For each food item it collected, a robot got 2,000 energy units. For each food deposit, the robot earned one point.

In addition to earning points, robots had to avoid toxic food and enemy drones that corrupted their programming.

Symantec received 196 entries from students across the United States and Canada. It plugged their programs into its simulator. Each program was replicated to yield 50 robots.

The programs ran for 10 rounds, each with one million “ticks,” or movements allowed. The program whose robots earned the most average points won.

Brownell’s robots received an average of 1.75 billion points per round. The first-place programmer, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned more than 3 billion points.

Brownell thinks part of the key to his success was programming his robots to self-repair.

“If one robot was corrupted (by eating bad food), it would stop moving. When another robot would bump into it, the healthy robot could copy its programming to the damaged one and repair it,” he explained.

Brownell’s robots handled drones in a similar fashion.

When a robot encountered a drone, it was programmed to stun the enemy by transferring some of its code to the drone.

Then another robot would come along and repair the compromised robot and drone. So Brownell was able to convert the 20 drones into robots, giving him a larger food-gathering army.

“And the drones are immune to toxic food,” he noted.

Symantec, a California-based information technology company, has held similar competitions at individual universities before, but this was their first nationwide venture.

Participants could work from their home, work or school computers, then submit their programs to Symantec. Brownell wrote his program on a laptop at home.

“We really like to excite the students, possibly recruit some to our company, and in general get them excited about programming and engineering,” said Carey Nachenberg, a Symantec fellow.

Brownell’s silver medal finish in the competition came with a $5,000 prize. He will put the money toward a $10,000 In the Groove arcade-style dance machine. He plans to use the game as an investment, putting it in a public place and charging people money to play.

Video game dancing is just a hobby and side business venture, though. As for a future career, Brownell wants to be a software developer.

Mary Ann Albright covers higher education. She can be reached at maryann.albright@lee.net or 758-9518.