[pmlamotte]

You bring up the real-time component, which is something we didn't do and from what I can tell the OP does not plan to do either. Real time is an entirely different beast and something I haven't seen in these types of competitions yet. I'd love to see one that does do it though.

Another cool competition is MIT's Battlecode, which actually gives you a bytecode limit. If your code executes past the bytecode limit, your AI is paused and will actually resume on the next turn, without notification. Thus you'll be continuing with possibly old/dirty data. That pretty much prevents you from using any standard libraries and doing bytecode level optimizations, as well as manually yielding if you know it will take too long.

Your robots also can only talk to each other through a radio API that has limited bandwidth and possible corruption if I recall correctly. It's a complete opposite of what I worked on, where we focused more on strategy rather than code optimization.