eWeek has a report that IBM has been testing its grid-computing system. What better than a distributed AI to stress the grid? The University of Wisconsin developed GameGrid derived from IBM's OptimalGrid and id Software's Quake 2. The article reports that about 80 bots were playing within the game.

As someone familiar with this engine, I have to question their decision to use Quake 2. It's an amazing engine for learning game development and AI in particular, but it's not well designed for stress testing distributed frameworks. There are built in limitations like the maximum number of players or entities, which require a complete redesign of the communication protocol to remove. So in essence, 80 bots is a limit unless you rewrite a lot of Quake 2 itself. Maybe a distributed engine like NeL would have been a better choice?

Slashdot is running the same story too.