Live data from Hacker News

Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

helloworldopen.com

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#31
post #24

> The server will send you track details and car positions and your job is to send car control messages to the server. You'll communicate with a game server using JSON over TCP. More details will be delivered later.” I don't understand how this could work for a real-time game. I don't know what the input format is like but assuming you need to provide control commands eg: {accelerate:1.0, steer:-0.01, brake:0} Then t…

Hi! Very good question :) The message protocol is synchronized because of latency. When the developers test their bots against the game servers, the server allows long response times. When automated races are run in the cloud (with low latency), the response times need to be more strict.

Can you test your own bots? As far as I can tell, the rules only specify that they're automatically tested daily. I'd like the ability to test whenever I need to.

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have a Turkish passport and I live in Germany with a residence permit. I joined with two German colleagues, hoping that would be OK.

(Disclaimer: I'm not part of the organizing team, but I do work for Reaktor - so this is just my opinion, not an official position.) As I've understood, the same country requirement works just like in sports: you need to be a citizen of the country if you want to play in the national team. I would suggest contacting the organizers about your situation.

I think that comparison is flawed as there's only one team per country (and discipline) sent to e.g. the Soccer World Cup or the Olympic Games, whereas here it could be potentially way more. As a sibling already mentioned: there shouldn't be any artificial borders in a global (hacker) community.

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#33
post #13

It sounds like a cool competition, but it would be nice if they gave a little more explanation about their technical solution. If it's true that the only way to test your bot is by uploading it to them and waiting for the CI to finish (once per day), then that's not very nice at all. Will the participants get an environment in which they can test their bots outside of the competition CI?

Servers are available for testing during development, running the code on your own computer - the CI server is useful in that it verifies that your code compiles and runs on the linux machine used during the competition.

I thought it was supposed to run on your own laptop during the competition?

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#34

Was about to apply but I'm confused about the rules requiring all members to be the same nationality. I have a French passport, so my nationality would legally be French, but I live in the UK, and work with English, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian developers(all living and working in the UK), some of whom I was considering asking to join a team with me. I think this rule needs some amendment. Edit: also to explain some m…

I have a Danish passport, but have lived in Norway my whole life. Would have liked to join with some of my friends, well, well...

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have a Turkish passport and I live in Germany with a residence permit. I joined with two German colleagues, hoping that would be OK.

(Disclaimer: I'm not part of the organizing team, but I do work for Reaktor - so this is just my opinion, not an official position.) As I've understood, the same country requirement works just like in sports: you need to be a citizen of the country if you want to play in the national team. I would suggest contacting the organizers about your situation.

> you need to be a citizen of the country if you want to play in the national team.

Citizenship and Nationality are two distinct concepts. I am a citizen of the UK, but I do not have UK/English Nationality

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have a Turkish passport and I live in Germany with a residence permit. I joined with two German colleagues, hoping that would be OK.

(Disclaimer: I'm not part of the organizing team, but I do work for Reaktor - so this is just my opinion, not an official position.) As I've understood, the same country requirement works just like in sports: you need to be a citizen of the country if you want to play in the national team. I would suggest contacting the organizers about your situation.

It would be a shame if they disqualified me/us. I'm in this for fun. I guess everyone is. If I can travel freely in Europe and have no problems being in a "German" team, I think there mustn't be any problems.

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Very good question :) The message protocol is synchronized because of latency. When the developers test their bots against the game servers, the server allows long response times. When automated races are run in the cloud (with low latency), the response times need to be more strict.

Can you test your own bots? As far as I can tell, the rules only specify that they're automatically tested daily. I'd like the ability to test whenever I need to.

Yes, we'll provide test game servers that you can use.

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#39
post #2

It's not only those three languages. From the rules[1]: Programming languages that are currently available for selection are C, C# / Mono, Clojure, CoffeeScript, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, Go. At the moment, due to technical reasons, we cannot 100% guarantee that all of these will be supported, but we'll do our best. You can change the programming language at any time. [1] https://helloworldopen.…

What about OCaml or F#?

Re: Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclaimer: I'm not part of the organizing team, but I do work for Reaktor - so this is just my opinion, not an official position.) As I've understood, the same country requirement works just like in sports: you need to be a citizen of the country if you want to play in the national team. I would suggest contacting the organizers about your situation.

It would be a shame if they disqualified me/us. I'm in this for fun. I guess everyone is. If I can travel freely in Europe and have no problems being in a "German" team, I think there mustn't be any problems.

I agree. The main point of this competition is fun - having beta tested the system I can promise that writing bots and watching them compete is a lot of fun. I hope your team can participate.
Post reply on HN