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Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

blog.codecombat.com

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Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#11

Post by nwinter »

asselinpaul wrote: post #9

Great to see CodeCombat getting more exposure. I've actually started to use it to teach Javascript to 10 year olds in my local primary school (through a CodeClub I run). It has been a great experience and a lot of kids are moving quickly through the campaign levels. I even have a few kids who moved on to the multiplayer levels. Quick remark: the computers in the school are Core 2 Duo machines with 1.75GB of RAM. They…

We'll keep working on the RAM needs, but yeah, that is just about the lower limit that I would expect to be able to play the game at all currently. We have a lot of work to do, but don't worry, we'll get it running on older and older hardware as we optimize. Thanks for your patience (and your students').

I've started a GitHub issue to track that coordinate selector bug: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/issues/1038 – appreciate the bug report!

Interestingly, we have a 10-year-old who hangs out in our dev chat and helps us playtest and simulate. He actually came up with a strategy that did pretty well on the ladders for this latest one, and we'd challenge our other (existing developer) playtesters to c'mon, surely you can beat the 10-year-old!

Looking to the future, we have some ideas to push that younger and younger, too.

Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#12

Post by joshbert »

gsaines wrote: post #10
joshbert wrote: post #6

I wonder how their last employment program went. Any comments, gsaines?

Really well actually. The TLDR summary is "we got swamped and made 4 placements." We had ~50 good candidates that got in touch, but we took PG's advice to do things that don't scale, which meant I was doing high touch recruiting. About 2 weeks in, we decided to refocus on 12 of the candidates and we placed 4 of those. In the interim we've built out an automated profile system, employer portal, and a bunch of internal…

That's a great response, thank you.

Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#13

Post by [deleted] »

asselinpaul wrote: post #9

Great to see CodeCombat getting more exposure. I've actually started to use it to teach Javascript to 10 year olds in my local primary school (through a CodeClub I run). It has been a great experience and a lot of kids are moving quickly through the campaign levels. I even have a few kids who moved on to the multiplayer levels. Quick remark: the computers in the school are Core 2 Duo machines with 1.75GB of RAM. They…

[deleted]

Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#14

Post by gsaines »

joshbert wrote: post #12
gsaines wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really well actually. The TLDR summary is "we got swamped and made 4 placements." We had ~50 good candidates that got in touch, but we took PG's advice to do things that don't scale, which meant I was doing high touch recruiting. About 2 weeks in, we decided to refocus on 12 of the candidates and we placed 4 of those. In the interim we've built out an automated profile system, employer portal, and a bunch of internal…

That's a great response, thank you.

You're quite welcome!

Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#15

Post by michaelmior »

schmatz wrote: post #8
michaelmior wrote: post #5

Interesting that there's an option to simulate games to speed up tournament progress. I wonder how the output of the simulation is validated.

Hi michaelmior, Those simulations are used to calculate the public leaderboards during the competition. They aren't used for final rankings as the simulation results need to be validated. However, they provide a nice way for people to gauge their standing. To perform the final ranking/validation, we'll play n of the top games on each team against each other and then sort by wins and losses. We're not quite sure of ho…

Thanks for the response! So in theory, a player could game the public leaderboards by returning incorrect results for a simulation? This seems like a reasonable choice.

Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#16

Post by pjbrunet »

Have some self-respect. If this was any other profession, a contest like this would not be tolerated. If people get the idea programmers work for free, as long as you have a clever contest, that idea becomes popular and it's bad for all of us in the long run. The fact there's lots of prizes here doesn't change the underlying problem. Contests, in any field, devalue the profession.

Even if I was a high school teacher (winning this might look good on a resume) I would still tell my students to avoid contests because: Why work for free when you can work for money and have an even greater feeling of accomplishment? When I was in high school (20 years ago) I had paying clients and paying subscribers and had won programming contests and I still value the real-world work experience more than the contests.

As someone who won lots of contests in school: sometimes they are rigged, often the prizes never materialize, often it's free publicity (great photo opportunity) for whoever organized the contest. Live and learn.

Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#19

Post by schmatz »

michaelmior wrote: post #15
schmatz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi michaelmior, Those simulations are used to calculate the public leaderboards during the competition. They aren't used for final rankings as the simulation results need to be validated. However, they provide a nice way for people to gauge their standing. To perform the final ranking/validation, we'll play n of the top games on each team against each other and then sort by wins and losses. We're not quite sure of ho…

Thanks for the response! So in theory, a player could game the public leaderboards by returning incorrect results for a simulation? This seems like a reasonable choice.

Yep, they could.

If people start doing that to mess up results, we have ways of remedying that situation. We haven't had to deal with any cheaters thus far as our users are pretty awesome (and there really is no reason to cheat).

We'd probably send each game out multiple times and require consensus or run all the simulations ourselves. I don't anticipate having to do anything of that nature, but it's interesting problem to think about!

Re: Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

#20

Post by pdenya »

pjbrunet wrote: post #16

Have some self-respect. If this was any other profession, a contest like this would not be tolerated. If people get the idea programmers work for free, as long as you have a clever contest, that idea becomes popular and it's bad for all of us in the long run. The fact there's lots of prizes here doesn't change the underlying problem. Contests, in any field, devalue the profession. Even if I was a high school teacher…

I don't know why you're so down on this. It's a competitive game that looks fun, no one is forcing you to take part. The code created here isn't even useful for any other purpose! It's not some 99 designs contest for code, it's like the Stripe CTF challenges if anything.
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