I followed the last Google AI challenge pretty closely, and enjoyed it, but how does the organizer Jeff Cameron keep getting away with invoking Google in the competition's name? He has basically zero affiliation to Google, and the last round of the competition had some pretty embarrassing snafus. (For instance, registration was broken for quite a while because he was using the Google SMTP server to send out messages, and when the competition opened and his registration script starting sending out huge numbers of registration emails, Google shut him down as a probable spammer.)
As read on the IRC channel (#aichallenge on freenode) some time ago, someone involved worked at Google and managed to get an OK to use the name, even though Google has nothing to do with it. Don't ask me how that happened.
Go to the IRC channel for a while and you are sure to hear this story, since new people constantly ask why Google doesn't put more resources into the challenge.
I wish Google was a little more involved. The competition could've used some resources or funding last time. The format has a lot of potential since any language[1] can be used as long as you can get it to run on Ubuntu 10.something and make a starter package.
[1] as opposed to most other competitions where one is restricted to the usual suspects (Java, C#, Python).
