BotWars 2026

BotWars 2026 is an all-island, inter-university artificial intelligence programming competition organized by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Student Branch Chapter of the Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT) in Sri Lanka. Operating alongside the PRESTIGE workshop series, this annual tournament challenges university students to shift away from manual gaming and physical robotics. Instead, it focuses entirely on algorithmic automation, algorithmic strategy, and classical AI execution within a simulated competitive environment.

The core challenge of the competition requires teams to design, develop, and deploy autonomous software agents capable of playing strategic card games. Using standard game engines and structural frameworks provided via a centralized GitHub repository, developers write code that enables their bots to make real-time calculated decisions, predict opponent behavior, and continuously optimize their moves. The entire tournament runs hands-free, meaning the success of a team relies purely on the logic, efficiency, and adaptability of their pre-written code as it battles other bots on a shared live leaderboard.

The 2026 iteration kicked off on June 1st with a nationwide call for registration, attracting top coding talent from tech universities across the country. Following an intensive technical briefing in mid-July that outlined game rules and platform sandboxes, the competition progressed through a series of online qualifiers to narrow down the bracket. The event reached its climax on August 8th during a live Grand Finale, where the top-performing algorithms faced off in a round-robin tournament, ultimately crowning Team Calit from the Informatics Institute of Technology as the national champions.