title: Limiting Thread Execution Processor Cycles in Java
body: <p>I'm writing an AI-testing Framework for a competition.  Participants submit a Bot class which matches a given Interface.  Then all the bots play a turn-based game.  On every turn, I want to do the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>For every bot B:
      start a thread that runs at most N cycles and does B.getNextMove()
  wait for all threads to complete
  Make all moves (from each bot).
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My difficulty comes in saying "at most N cycles".  I can limit all the bots by time (say half a second per turn) but this means that some can get more processor cycles than others and doesn't permit a strict "your bot should be able to make its decision re: a turn in X time" requirement in the competition.</p>
  
  <p>As stated, this is in Java.  Any ideas?  I've been looking at concurrency and locking but this doesn't feel like the right direction.  Also, it's possible to not run the bots in Parralel and then use time for the restriction (given that the computer isn't running anything else at the time), but this would be undesirable as it would significantly slow down the speed at which we could have results from the games.</p>