Technology recently developed for a large scale computing project offers what we feel is the first attempt to provide a platform where students can compare and contrast their skills and performance with students world-wide. The World-Wide-Mind [w2mind. org] is an artificial intelligence (AI) project that aims to make various tools, algorithms, artificial worlds and artificial minds available online as web services that can be interacted with remotely. The core idea of the project is that anyone who has an interesting assignment can make this available to others who can run it remotely. Similarly anyone who has written an algorithm to solve the problem posed by the assignment can make it available online. A freely available program can then be used by third parties to run the algorithm (or mind) in the artificial world and observe its performance.

A score board maintained by the artificial world service can record the best performing minds. This architecture was recently used by a group of final year computing students at the Dublin Institute of Technology, to solve a relatively simple AI problem. The performance of their algorithms was used in their grading, but unlike traditional assignments, their software is still available to interact with online, as indeed is the problem world they used. One of the goals of the World-Wide-Mind project is to get researchers/lecturers/teachers to put problem worlds online as well as the artificial minds that are used to solve the problems. Other institutions can then easily reuse the world in their own assignments, and compare the results of their students with the results of others where relative performance could easily be used for automated marking. Students can also control runs of existing minds with existing worlds.