Thanks everyone. I'm totally blown away, as I didn't think my approach was all that much better.
I'll write a blog entry with all the deets but I'm behind enough on work as it is...

My code is of course still . The commit logs might be somewhat entertaining. The contest version is tagged a1k0nbot-2.18.2. (I lost count of version numbers so I have some -3.x tags... ignore them). I have a VPS host running my contest version bot on if you want to play against it.
I work for Yahoo! Mail in the service engineering organization currently, writing deployment tools for coordinating software upgrades to tens of thousands of machines.