It's Rock, Paper, Azure!

Get your FREE 30 day Azure account when you take the Rock, Paper, Azure! Challenge. You could also win an XBOX/Kinect bundle!

Did you play Rock, Paper, Scissors as a kid? Does it still determine who makes the afternoon coffee run? Then you already know how to play the game. Now's your chance to code your own player "bot" and test your skills online. Will your bot have what it takes to crush the competition? Join the weekly tournaments and battle it out with other developers to win weekly prizes (not to mention serious bragging rights). Here's how.

Peter Laudati, Brian Hitney and Jim O'Neil are the masterminds behind this challenge, and here's what Peter had to say on his blog about it:

"The concept is this: you code a “bot” that plays rock, paper, scissors against the other players in the game. Simple, right? Here’s where it gets interesting. Rock, paper, scissors by itself isn’t all that interesting (after all, you can’t really beat random in a computer game – assuming you can figure out a good random generator!), so there are two additional moves in the game. The first is dynamite, which beats rock, paper, and scissors. Sounds very powerful – and it is – however, you only have a few per match so you need to decide when to use them. The other move is a water balloon. The water balloon beats dynamite, but it loses to everything else. You have unlimited water balloons. Now, with the additional rules, it becomes a challenge to craft an effective strategy! On the contest site, we have a live Leaderboard showing where all the bots stand. We do what we call “continuous integration” on the leaderboard – as soon as your bot enters, it’s an all out slugfest and you see where you are in near real time. It’s an exciting battle of wits as you race to out think the other players and constantly update your bot to defeat the others!"

You can download sample bots to use a "template bot", if you will, so you don't have to start from scratch, and can dive into some code right away - all while learning Azure fundamentals. If you've been thinking about looking into Azure, this is a great way to do it. It's fun, free, and you could win.