
RoboNode - Simulated robot competition - michael_fine
http://nic.nko3.jitsu.com/
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iandanforth
This seems really cool, however I find the interface confusing. Here's what I
expected:

1\. A sandbox where the opponent is a default set of code.

You start with the default code as well and there are two buttons. 'Start One
Game' and 'Collect Statistics'. The first runs your code in real time against
the computer opponent, the other runs many many games to collect win/loss
scores on your code.

A critical component here is optimization. X games MUST run within 10 seconds.
If they don't your code is too slow and must be refactored.

After you have a winning win/loss record against the default code you are then
presented with a 'Challenge' button.

2\. Challenge mode

In challenge mode you are facing off against every piece of code ever
submitted. Your code gets run automatically against each bot until it looses,
and you're given a rank. Here you're also given a 'Collect statistics' button
where you try to climb the ladder many times to see, on average, how well your
code does.

3\. Scoring / Alerts

When you reach a new spot on the leader board you are awarded points.
Individuals wins mean almost nothing, it's only when you defeat a higher
ranked opponent that you get points.

If someone else manages to beat you, you are sent an alert so that you can go
review that persons code.

Overall I think this is a very cool idea and I hope to see it evolve into
something a bit more like what I described above!

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Baliw
Looks like Scalatron.

<http://scalatron.github.com/>

RoboNode looks pretty cool although it's limited in the same way Scalatron is
limited, one language.

I'd love to hack one up that is based on a network API so that the bots could
be written in any language.

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aymeric
Something similar but based on the Terrarium.net game:
<http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net>

Cool factor: the blue ball teleports your creatures to other people's
terrariums to get them to reproduce and invade.

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guyzmo
I love it:

An error has occurred:
{"code":"ECONNREFUSED","errno":"ECONNREFUSED","syscall":"connect"}

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jacques_chester
There's a thriving genre of such programs. Robot Battle[1], Robocode[2] (which
was inspired by Robot Battle) and RealTimeBattle[3] are probably the best
known. The latter has the nice property that it supports multiple languages.

The ur-program in the genre seems to be RobotWar[4], which inspired Robot
Battle.

[1] <http://www.robotbattle.com/>

[2] <http://robocode.sourceforge.net/>

[3] <http://realtimebattle.sourceforge.net/>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar>

~~~
chrislloyd
My co-founder and I made one called Brains[1] for a past Railscamp. Aaron Iba
also taught a course at MIT[2] with a similar competition.

[1] <https://github.com/chrislloyd/brains> [2]
[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-370-robocraft-programming-competition-january-iap-2005)

