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Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

play.battlesnake.io

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Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#31

Post by ggggtez »

bvanvugt wrote: post #26
nullandvoid wrote: post #10

Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder

This is a super interesting question to us, and to be honest we're not sure of the answer. Is it possible for a single ML snake to achieve 100% 1v1 win rate? What about 1v7? What we've learned so far is that playing against multiple snakes, especially AI/ML driven snakes, adds an incredible amount of complexity to the game and the top ranked snakes tend switch around quite a bit as players adjust to attack/defend spe…

Sure, the answer is trivial: 100% perfect agent isn't possible. Just have an AI play against itself. Since the game is simultaneous moves, there is no "first move advantage" or anything, so it would play out exactly as a mirror (give or take some random noise in the model). The only thing that would break the symmetry is where food spawns, which also would just be a coin flip which snake it would be close to.

In a 8 player game, it's a little different because there are 'side' and 'corner' positions. Obviously this isn't symmetric anymore, so if you played many games, one position would make itself clearly superior. That likely depends again, on the probability of food appearing in a snakes "zone of control" which you could represent with a voronoi diagram.

My gut instinct is that a 'side' position would eventually be revealed to be stronger because the snake has more options and freedom.

Of course, in a tournament setup, it's fully possible for an AI to have 100% win rate just by random chance, because you are only playing a finite number of games.

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#32

Post by static »

MattyRad wrote: post #9

Does anyone have a list of competitive programming challenges like this? Specifically where you're programming a board game against other algorithms. Googling "competitive programming challenges" doesn't yield a lot of good results. I'm aware of http://fruitbots.org/ , which I had a lot of fun with.

BotLand is a blast (can write your own scripts or use built in options to get started without coding). There are also related developer streams on Twitch most days if you're into pulling back the curtain. https://bot.land/

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#36

Post by ggggtez »

nullandvoid wrote: post #10

Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder

Very plainly: no, hand coding is not going to be able to compete with a fully developed ML/AI agent. Even simple hand coded agents use AI techniques such as minimax, which is fundamentally an "AI" technique even though most people today don't really think about it that way since there are no deep neural networks involved.

However, this contest looks unpopular enough that you can likely still compete because no one has spent the effort to actually build a proper deep-neural-network agent, etc.

You can work out the problem space yourself by simply calculating all the possible board states. Or you could calculate the move states (3 moves per player, to the power of the average number of turns).

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#38

Post by anonytrary »

jaimex2 wrote: post #37

For those that clicked thinking there be an actual multiplayer snake game over http: slither.io Be warned, this can ruin productivity in your day.

That game is super addicting. You will need a mouse. You will have fun testing out various bait-and-switch moves you can use to get noobs. Once you get good enough to make it into the top 10, everyone starts trying to kill you and it becomes exponentially more difficult to stay alive. I used to edit the script to increase my event-out rate a little bit to give me an edge, but I'm not sure it worked, seeing as the server could just throttle the events anyway. Once your snake gets long enough, you can enclose other snakes in a loop and torture them as they face their impending demise. Fun times.

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#39

Post by PudgePacket »

nullandvoid wrote: post #10

Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder

Some competitions like this only give you a certain amount of "cycles" per turn, so hand written solutions would have an "advantage" in that sense.

I don't know if that method is applicable to this particular game though, since the processing is done by the user.

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