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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

#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.

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

#3
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.

Actually the discussion of using an AI trained robot has been frequently discussed on the various forums. Nimbella has even an "python ai" runtime that would support it. However does not seem the winning robots actually uses any A.I.

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

#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://corewars.org/

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

#8
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.

That's very much something that happens in Battlesnake[1]! There's a fun Go Time episode about it all[2].

[1]: https://play.battlesnake.com/

[2]: https://changelog.com/gotime/182

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

#9

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?

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

#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 their robots on.

Whenever a kid was called by the teacher to do their one-on-one, they protested "one more minute, I need to improve my robot!"

In September, my daughter starts university in software engineering; mission accomplished! ;)

[1] https://robocode.sourceforge.io/

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