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Battlecode – AI Programming Competition

battlecode.org

11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Battlecode – AI Programming Competition

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built two niche games as AI programming games in ruby: Bang!: https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/mustached-nemesis The Resistance: https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/secret-nemesis I'd like to find a community to share these with but have no idea what these things are even called.

I think it'd be neat to have a coordination service that runs tournaments for AIs playing games like Resistance. People register a URL with the service that exposes an API that lets the coordination service tell them the current state of the game, and responds with their next move, if any. People could then write these AIs in whatever they want (and bear most of the cost of running them for tournament style simulatio…

Necessarily turn-based then? Otherwise low latency would be an advantage

Re: Battlecode – AI Programming Competition

#13
post #2

This reminds me of Codingame, they have a similar challenge where you code an AI for a Dice Wars-like game and send it off to the ladder to compete against other people. It's great fun

I love codingame! I looked into it before recommending it to a friend and got all sucked in. I'm currently working on an AI bot there for a competition. It's fun and forcing me to go do research on AI concepts.

Re: Battlecode – AI Programming Competition

#14

Are there competitive AIs generated by machine learning? Or is it all custom coded?

It's generally custom, although we've had teams use ML strategies to tune their bots in the past. (I'm one of the people who runs this competition).

We impose tight runtime limits on the code your AI can run - generally limiting the number of bytecodes the JVM can execute per turn per robot. This is partly pedagogical; it kinda-sorta simulates embedded programming, like for a real robot. It's also practical; it keeps people from accidentally DOS'ing themselves or our servers with infinitely-looping AI.

On the other hand, 20000 instructions per turn doesn't give you much leeway for, say, matrix multiplication, so most sophisticated ML isn't possible at runtime. You can do simple things, but they have to be tightly written.

Re: Battlecode – AI Programming Competition

#16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting the list. I call these programming games for lack of a better name, some of them go way back (e.g.: Core War) [1]. I remember playing Robowar [2] on toaster macs way back when. [1] http://www.retroprogramming.com/2009/09/history-of-programmi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboWar

I enjoyed playing corewar so much I wanted to reimplement it on Linux. I ended up never finishing it because I found myself inventing Google Wave (in 1997, in DOS). But it was a fun project.

> I found myself inventing Google Wave (in 1997, in DOS)

What was the project? Something you ever released?

Re: Battlecode – AI Programming Competition

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built two niche games as AI programming games in ruby: Bang!: https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/mustached-nemesis The Resistance: https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/secret-nemesis I'd like to find a community to share these with but have no idea what these things are even called.

I think it'd be neat to have a coordination service that runs tournaments for AIs playing games like Resistance. People register a URL with the service that exposes an API that lets the coordination service tell them the current state of the game, and responds with their next move, if any. People could then write these AIs in whatever they want (and bear most of the cost of running them for tournament style simulatio…

it wouldn't be difficult to adapt my existing codebase for that. It would probably have to involve webhooks or websockets, and games would play out a lot more slowly than doing it locally with gems. As is, playing 10000 games only takes about 45 seconds. Running across the web is going to slow that down significantly

Re: Battlecode – AI Programming Competition

#20
post #3

If anyone is interested in more of these, I'm trying to keep a list here. https://github.com/dakaraphi/development-resources/blob/mast...

Screeps (https://screeps.com/) is an amazingly great example of this sort of game. It's available online, on steam, and as it works in JavaScript you can use almost any language due to the huge variety of transpilers. It has numerous constraints that make the game more interesting including CPU and memory limits.
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