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Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

play.battlesnake.io

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Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#21

Post by tills13 »

cakebrewery wrote: post #18
tills13 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, they've recommended Heroku... however, their dynos have a cold-start problem, causing your snake to sometimes timeout. I would recommend using an AWS free-tier instance if you have the option.

I remember that, they recommended a workaround last minute for it. Our snake depended on simulations so we just spun up a beefy GCP instance for a short period at the expense of a few cents.

hah! last year, for our bounty snake, we used a c4.2xlarge. Still, we could only manage a depth of 6-7 before hitting the response-time limit.

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#23

Post by tills13 »

nullandvoid wrote: post #10

Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder

Last year, I believe only one team even _tried_ an ML snake and they didn't make enough progress to actually compete. "Hand coding," so far, has been the way to go.

Not sure if it's what you meant, but it's less "hand coding" and more about trying to enumerate board-state possibilities (i.e. "I'm hungry" or "there's a snake at x") and addressing them via generalized algorithms.

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#24

Post by tills13 »

bvanvugt wrote: post #5
phoe-krk wrote: post #4

I just realized that a multiplayer Snake is basically the TRON racing game played on a discrete grid.

Haha, yes! We actually had a "Tron Mode" at the tournament last year that just flooded the board with food to replicate light cycles.

Wasn't there also a bounty snake with tail pinning on?

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#25

Post by bvanvugt »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #6

" Step 1 Write a program to play the game Snake Step 2 Deploy using whatever technology you like Step 3 Battle other snakes and compete in arenas! " Sounds cool, that title make it sound like yet another worms.io clone, but this is programmatic gaming - I feel the title should include that, or "make a snake bot to battle in a classic 'snake' arena".

Yeah I like something like this: "Build a bot to play the classic game 'Snake'"

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#26

Post by bvanvugt »

nullandvoid wrote: post #10

Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder

This is a super interesting question to us, and to be honest we're not sure of the answer. Is it possible for a single ML snake to achieve 100% 1v1 win rate? What about 1v7?

What we've learned so far is that playing against multiple snakes, especially AI/ML driven snakes, adds an incredible amount of complexity to the game and the top ranked snakes tend switch around quite a bit as players adjust to attack/defend specific strategies.

If anyone has formal theory around this sort of problem, we'd love to investigate further.

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#27

Post by [deleted] »

MattyRad wrote: post #9

Does anyone have a list of competitive programming challenges like this? Specifically where you're programming a board game against other algorithms. Googling "competitive programming challenges" doesn't yield a lot of good results. I'm aware of http://fruitbots.org/ , which I had a lot of fun with.

[deleted]

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#28

Post by nullandvoid »

bvanvugt wrote: post #26
nullandvoid wrote: post #10

Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder

This is a super interesting question to us, and to be honest we're not sure of the answer. Is it possible for a single ML snake to achieve 100% 1v1 win rate? What about 1v7? What we've learned so far is that playing against multiple snakes, especially AI/ML driven snakes, adds an incredible amount of complexity to the game and the top ranked snakes tend switch around quite a bit as players adjust to attack/defend spe…

Glad to know that the answer isn't a definitive 'yes' right now then! It's certainly an interesting space I bet you enjoy reading through the solutions :)

Re: Battlesnake – Competitive Snake Games over HTTP

#29

Post by nullandvoid »

tills13 wrote: post #23
nullandvoid wrote: post #10

Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder

Last year, I believe only one team even _tried_ an ML snake and they didn't make enough progress to actually compete. "Hand coding," so far, has been the way to go. Not sure if it's what you meant, but it's less "hand coding" and more about trying to enumerate board-state possibilities (i.e. "I'm hungry" or "there's a snake at x") and addressing them via generalized algorithms.

That's interesting I updated my comment to be a bit more specific.

I'd love to know how the problem space looks in this game vs chess for example as I mentioned.

My terming is a little vague what I had meant is 'black box' solutions I guess where the logic can not be inferred via looking at the code

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