Show HN: Bomberland – An AI competition to build the best Bomberman bot

Hey HN,

I'm Joy from Coder One. This is an early version of our upcoming Bomberman-inspired AI competition. Bomberland is an intentionally challenging environment for ML featuring non-trivial problems like real-time decision-making, large search space, and both adversarial + cooperative play.[1]

Longer term, we're building a place where anyone can explore cutting-edge algorithms like deep RL, GAN, MCTS etc on meaningful real-world challenges. Think OpenAI Gym, but with active competitions and open-ended multiplayer simulations.[2]

We'd love to hear what you think!

[1] Bomberland write-up: https://www.gocoder.one/blog/bomberland-multi-agent-artifici...

[2] About us: https://www.gocoder.one/blog/next-generation-open-ai-gym

Thanks for the question!

Where CodinGame and TopCoder are great platforms for competitive programming, solvable programming problems and short-form competitions, our longer-term focus is more on open-ended, ongoing sandbox simulations that evolve over time. We think this format will lend itself more to challenging real-world simulations and ML approaches (think self-driving cars, drones, and challenging games like StarCraft II).

While Kaggle is great for classification-type problems and even recently started running their own simulation competitions, we feel there's a lot of room for a platform that is 100% purpose-built for simulation-type competitions (e.g. better visualisers, Twitch streams, matchmaking).

Sorry, not sure what this is-- an online version of OpenAI?

Also, in the getting started section, it assumes docker. I clicked on "docker alternative" but it takes me back to the same page.

As it is, Im not sure what this is, or how I can get started. Do I also have to create an account to try it out?

If the game is completely symmetrical, it would be funny if someone comes up with an "AI" which just mirrors the opponent's moves. If it acts faster than the frames, we would always get a draw.

Edit: Nevermind, just read about the power ups.

If powerups are randomly placed, it's possible for a "better" player to lose to a "worse" player simply by luck of the draw. How is that accounted for in determining the best AI?