The Programmer's Tournament

This is a tournament to let programmers show off their creativity and skill. It's where they develop Pokemon AIs (like the in-game one) to compete against other AIs. The winner will play against a real human player. Even if they don't win,they get a trophy/badge. This could attract skilled programmers that are also Pokemon fans to Smogon. Finally, it would be interesting and fun. A lot of people would watch it.

Unfortunately, a fully functioning pokemon AI is far to complex to be built on the basis required to hold tournaments, both insofar as time constraints and number of people who possess both the time and skill to do so. Furthermore, most of smogon's programmers are occupied with other things, such as simulators, wifi tools, and damage calculators. To ask these people to start anew is probably not going to get you a favorable response. In most cases, they just don't have the time to balance so many projects, and will stick with the one they already have hundreds of hours invested in.

That being said, if you have any personal questions regarding competitive pokemon AI, I recommend you talk to user David Stone, who has been working on his own AI program for quite some time now, and is most likely smogon's foremost expert on the subject.

but isn't programming pretty much like magic? can't they just pull something quick out of their spellbook?