Hi jwatte,
Sorry for the late response. No, it's not the same game. In our version the grid is going to be much larger than 19x19 and the robot will be able too see beyond the neighboring cells. We plan to support both python and js as programming languages for the robot. We also plan to add graphical programming(dragging, dropping and connecting blocks of logic) and also training the robots by example(using machine learning).
Thanks for your inquiry,
The Hack Arena Team