
Google AI Challenge 2011 - philf
http://aichallenge.org/
======
maqr
From the rules:

> Any attempt to disrupt the normal operation of the contest software or the
> contest servers will result in the immediate involvement of law enforcement
> officials. Our policy is to always prosecute.

I get that people shouldn't be intentionally disrupting the servers, but that
sounds like an awful policy.

~~~
ramblerman
Why? If they don't want people trying to break into their servers. I'm
honestly asking, I don't understand your argument

~~~
gujk
For one, it exposes a heavy-hand predisposition makes me worry that a bug in
my program might result in a visit from police.

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arctangent
See also this previous thread from 212 (!) days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2349826>

There are two things worth pointing out:

1) This competition has previously been sponsored by Google but isn't run by
them. It's hosted by the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club.

2) Some people have been working on bots for this challenge for months now, so
they are likely to have a bit of a head start.

~~~
Tichy
That sucks (some people having a head start). What a silly way to run a
competition.

~~~
adambyrtek
I think the OP just meant that some people had seen this page before, not that
there is any conspiracy behind that.

~~~
Tichy
I didn't say it is a conspiracy, just silly.

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danielatc
The one thing that bugs me about the Google AI Challenges is that they do not
really encourage using modern AI techniques. It's all about intelligent
_developers_ rather than writing intelligent _software_. I really would like
to see a challenge which is all about data: identifying patterns and learning
to make predictions – rather than developing yet another heuristic for a
minimax algorithm...

~~~
jlla
You are free to try to identify patterns in enemys ants behaviour, make
predictions and win the game this way.

~~~
aerique
The challenge does not offer disk space for your bot to save data so it has to
start from scratch every match (unless you supply it with a lot of offline
training data).

There has been talk among the developers of the challenge of offering disk
space in on of the future challenges.

~~~
lukev
An alternative would be to allow bots to connect to an external server
maintained by the bot author to get the latest strategy, and dump match
history for analysis.

~~~
dkersten
Even just getting a second or two during startup to connect to external
servers and again a second or two at the end would be enough.

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pak
Very cool game spec. One thought: your ants are basically telepathic, so they
are able to share information instantly--e.g., the squares they see flow back
to your "master bot" which can instantly use this information in the current
turn for every other ant. I wonder how much more challenging it would be if
you had to build not a "master bot" that controls all ants, but a "bot" that
runs for _each ant_ , and they have their own individual inputs and state and
can perhaps transmit messages to other ants within a 3 block radius. Maybe
they can even lay down pheromones to mark territory... (too much SimAnt as a
kid, can you tell?)

Certainly it would be more realistic, and I think even more fun--but maybe a
little taxing on the server. But this is run by Google, right? Maybe next
year.

~~~
dkersten
This is a hive mind ant game!

~~~
phreeza
I wrote one in Python a while back. <https://github.com/phreeza/cells>

Contributions are always welcome.

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twymer
From the Reddit post:

> The contest is not ready till tomorrow. Everything is still beta today, all
> accounts so far will be purged tomorrow. ~amstan Contest Organizer

Source:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lhlt9/googles_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lhlt9/googles_ai_challenge/c2sr1fa)

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jxcole
When is the contest over? Last time I tried to do one of these things I only
had about a week which was not enough time for me to come up with a quality
program. Otherwise I would like to compete.

~~~
ReadEvalPost
The last one started September 10th and ended November 27th.

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dividuum
Great to see a game similar to the one I developed some years ago. My game was
a multiplayer realtime programming game. The ants were controlled by a
uploadable lua code. If you are interessted, feel free to visit and download
the sourcecode on <http://infon.dividuum.de/>

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janzer
Just so it is clear, we haven't actually launched yet. Although we should be
live within the next 48 hours.

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vyrotek
I still think a webservice-based version of these contests would be much more
fun. The idea would be to only give the simulator a URL of where your AI is
hosted. There would be an expected set of endpoints for the simulator to call
and would invoke your service when it was your turn. Perhaps the AI could call
services on the simulator as well.

So, instead of having to write your AI in the simulator's language you could
choose whatever you want. Another advantage is that you could run your own
database to store and query information so that your AI could become more
intelligent.

I've been looking for a new side project. Perhaps I've found it.

~~~
ReadEvalPost
Stdin/out is used to transfer information from/to the simulator, so any
language is possible. The list of languages they support is here:
<http://aichallenge.org/starter_packages.php>

You can also ask the contest organizers to add a compiler/interpreter if
anything is missing.

~~~
vyrotek
Ah, thanks. I was glad to see a C# package there ;)

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lukev
It looks like you can only upload code, and you aren't allowed to write any
files, which means that your bot can't be self-improving between matches.
Which IMHO is half the fun of an AI contest.

Or am I missing something?

~~~
ohyes
You could run the contest locally and have the bot incrementally improve
itself.

~~~
wlievens
But then you're adapting against yourself, or some limited set of demo bots.
It's not the same as out in the wild.

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levesque
After watching a game or two, I can tell that ants should always travel two by
two for warmonging. When two ants (walking together on the same front)
encounter a single ant, the one ant is always destroyed.

~~~
binarymax
:) what happens when your pair encounters three? Or if your pair are walking
horizontally next to each other in : formation and are attacked from above by
a pair in .. formation? I'm very interested to see the strategies that emerge
from this challenge.

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pumpmylemma
Has anyone found the contest end date? I have a project I can't put down
(unfortunately), but would really like to have time to enter.

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praptak
From a quick look the success of a strategy is very much dependent on the
characteristics of a map. It seems that there are maps where you cannot even
reach your opponent (maze_2, if I'm not mistaken.) Such maps punish defensive
strategies. On the other hand, open maps with anthills not far from each other
probably punish greedy strategies.

~~~
tompko
The maps are toroidal, i.e. the left and right sides are connected as are the
top and bottom. So it is possible to reach the enemy in maze_2.

~~~
praptak
I stand corrected, I missed the connection wrapping around the top/bottom
edge.

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fuzzythinker
Hey Andrew(tectonic), this is right up your alley ;)

<http://andrewcantino.com/ants.html>

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peteysd
What? No Clojure starter package yet?! C'mon, Google!

~~~
lukev
Google isn't actually running this. They were only a sponsor in years past.

It's actually run by the University of Waterloo computer science club as an
open-source project.

A Clojure package is in the works, I think.

~~~
gujk
A poster above makes the opposite claim, that the contest graduated from
Waterloo to Google.

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Hitchhiker
Reminds me of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life>

~~~
jgrahamc
Back in the early 1980s I used to play a programming game on the Sharp MZ-80K
which involved two programmers writing assembly language programs that would
move through the operating system memory in an attempt to reach low memory
(where the operating system was not stored) without crashing the machine.

Moving through the operating system meant actually overwriting portions of the
operating system as it was running with the running code and the relocating
the code to a new location lower down in memory (I've forgotten now but we had
some restriction on how far we could jump). Clearly this often meant keeping a
cached copy of the memory we were overwriting to put it back, but we could
only do that in the operating system itself.

~~~
shrikant
This seems like a true hacker's version of the Tron lightcycle game!

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jongraehl
The ICFP 2004 contest was also about "ants" -
[https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-
bin/contest/task...](https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-
bin/contest/task.php)

------
sundar22in
There are similar Java games for long <http://robocode.sourceforge.net/>

You write a robot tank which battles with other tanks.

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raheemm
If you can reproduce faster than anyone else you have a big edge. But I'm
curious on what the rules of reproduction are.

~~~
dmooney1
A bit simplified: when an ant moves to a food square, a new ant is produced
from a hill.

~~~
raheemm
But if you look at the games, some teams create new ants at a faster rate than
others, regardless of food consumption. The red ants seem to have an edge on
reproduction than others, right from the very beginning of the game.

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sygeek
Account creation is closed.

~~~
multikill
The contest starts from tomorrow : AI Challenge Fall 2011 - Ants Opens Oct 20
[http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1499](http://ai-
contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1499)

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dcolish
Third time for the challenge, nice going Waterloo!

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nchuhoai
<http://antme.codeplex.com/>

Not new, did a similar thing in C# in high school. Definitely a good way to
get into programming

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MikeGrace
Soooooo Cool! Never participated in one of these before. Looks like tons of
fun.

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asshole
ok well i cant it says account creation closed

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natch
My challenge back to Google:

The setup:

* A certain person named Prasand is in my Google contacts, along with his phone number.

* Prasand has recently sent email to me.

* Prasand is a reasonably common name in a certain English-speaking country of well over a billion people.

* A common phrase when calling someone is to say "Hi this is <name>" or "Hey this is <name>"

* Usually this comes near the beginning of the call.

* Prasand probably also has a Google account, and Google probably associates his phone number with his account, and thus can look up interesting things about him, such as his name and various words he is likely to use, by using caller ID when he calls into a Google voice number.

* Google knows my first name. Let's call me Natch.

* Speech recognition can be made more accurate if large quantities of data are available with which to build models of how language is used in context.

* Large data sets are available on the internets. Something tells me Google may even have access to large quantities of data already.

* Google even has the capability, if it wants to, to build user-specific language models.

Google, here is your challenge:

Hire an engineering director for your Google Voice team who can manage to
figure out how to do the correct transcription of the following five words at
the beginning of a phone call: "Hi Natch, this is Prasand."

Hint 1: you should fire whoever did the one you have right now.

Hint 2: less AI, more common sense.

~~~
iori42
> Large data sets are available on the internets. Something tells me Google
> may even have access to large quantities of data already.

You don't just need audio data, you also need the correct transcriptions to
learn anything from it. This reduces the amount of available data
significantly. And producing correct transcriptions is time consuming and
expensive.

