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I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

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Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#11

Post by judohacker »

rabbah wrote: post #2

I watched the youtube videos of all the battles so far and I was really surprised to see that a very simple strategy (in retrospect) was sufficient to win the competitions. I've been waiting to see if someone implements an AI bot that's trained on all the bots in the competition but maybe you just don't need to.

Years ago, I played around with Robocode and genetic programming to "evolve" battle strategies. I was always surprised by how simple the generated winning strategies were. They were always counter intuitive.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#12

Post by schemescape »

In case anyone on here is interested, I made a simple, in-browser JavaScript robot battle programming game like this (human vs. CPU only) that embeds VS Code's editor: https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/cyber-coliseum

Don't expect too much -- I just made this for fun :)

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#14

Post by SavantIdiot »

someguyorother wrote: post #9
SavantIdiot wrote: post #6

RobotWar lives![1] Yay! I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/ Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. Never heard of Faas Wars but now I'm excited to see what it is like. These programming-based games are way more fun, IMHO, than hackathons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar [2] http://cor…

> Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. I wonder if one could make a better ML system than genetic programming for creating CoreWar warriors. Perhaps a neural net connected to a differentiable SAT solver?

> The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores.

That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much./

In fact, it's been about 12 years since I last played around with CoreWars, so I'm not up on the newest theories.

It would be interesting to see how a genetic algorithm fares against current ML strategies. I'm completely in the dark as to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero work, I only know classifiers/SSD/autoencoders. Would be fun to learn with this environment tho.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#15

Post by jimmaswell »

judohacker wrote: post #10

When my daughter was in grade 5, I volunteered to teach programming for an afternoon while the teacher could do one-on-ones. I took Robocode[1], made a basic Robot class that the kids could easily extend, and then taught them just enough logic and syntax so they could have their robots battle their classmates'. It was a huge success. We had to close the door to the classroom because the kids were so loud, cheering th…

Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the others, same as my compsci professor and some studies said, and my experiences working tutoring suggested.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#16

Post by KMnO4 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #15
judohacker wrote: post #10

When my daughter was in grade 5, I volunteered to teach programming for an afternoon while the teacher could do one-on-ones. I took Robocode[1], made a basic Robot class that the kids could easily extend, and then taught them just enough logic and syntax so they could have their robots battle their classmates'. It was a huge success. We had to close the door to the classroom because the kids were so loud, cheering th…

Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the…

I can confirm. I went to a gifted school and Lego Mindstorms was on the curriculum.

Then in (conventional) high school I hosted a workshop on beginning Python (with Turtle) and half the people couldn’t understand why x=2 after “x=1” and “x+=1”.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#17

Post by ska »

rabbah wrote: post #2

I watched the youtube videos of all the battles so far and I was really surprised to see that a very simple strategy (in retrospect) was sufficient to win the competitions. I've been waiting to see if someone implements an AI bot that's trained on all the bots in the competition but maybe you just don't need to.

In most of these sorts of competition environments, it's a lot less work (and cheaper) to make a competitive hand-tuned algorithm that a really competitive AI version. If you are already working on a similar training environment with a bunch of free/cheap compute jumping in for a weekend or whatever could give decent results, but otherwise you're likely going to get destroyed by bespoke tactics.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#18

Post by xsmasher »

KMnO4 wrote: post #16
jimmaswell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the…

I can confirm. I went to a gifted school and Lego Mindstorms was on the curriculum. Then in (conventional) high school I hosted a workshop on beginning Python (with Turtle) and half the people couldn’t understand why x=2 after “x=1” and “x+=1”.

They need a consistent framework to understand what is happening - "variables are like little boxes where you can put a number or some letters" and "The equal sign lets you change what is in the box."

x+=1 just complicates the situation; use x=x+1 to avoid adding more special rules for now.

This stuff is teachable, but it doesn't help that the framework is very different than the similar-looking expressions from math class, where "x=1" followed by "x=2" is not allowed.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#19

Post by esrh »

jimmaswell wrote: post #15
judohacker wrote: post #10

When my daughter was in grade 5, I volunteered to teach programming for an afternoon while the teacher could do one-on-ones. I took Robocode[1], made a basic Robot class that the kids could easily extend, and then taught them just enough logic and syntax so they could have their robots battle their classmates'. It was a huge success. We had to close the door to the classroom because the kids were so loud, cheering th…

Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the…

I've never taught programming, but i find your last point hard to believe. Programming is human-made, and it was created to be understood and used by humans -- in contrast to say, math or science where things just are. Maybe you can claim that only a small subset of people can get great at programming, but i think that the vast majority of people can manage to learn the basics given enough time.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#20

Post by Causality1 »

esrh wrote: post #19
jimmaswell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the…

I've never taught programming, but i find your last point hard to believe. Programming is human-made, and it was created to be understood and used by humans -- in contrast to say, math or science where things just are. Maybe you can claim that only a small subset of people can get great at programming, but i think that the vast majority of people can manage to learn the basics given enough time.

Yes, they can. No, you can't force them to learn it in a practical way quite the same as you can, say, algebra. It's like teaching kids to paint. If you magically made everyone interested in painting most kids could become decent painters, but in real life they just aren't. Teaching a programming course to the general school population won't make 80% of kids capable of programming any more than compulsory art classes would make them into graphic designers.
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