
Halite: An AI Programming Challenge - Adrock
https://halite.io/
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danielvf
Here's a link to watch a sample game.
[https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478810998-2218848485.hl...](https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478810998-2218848485.hlt)

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wamatt
Here's one with a suprising comeback

[https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478706105-405156479.hlt](https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478706105-405156479.hlt)

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maaaats
I have to say that I didn't completely understand the rules after a read-
through. Some visuals and a complete walk-through would be nice, instead of
piecing it together reading the various parts of the "Learn"-page and going
back-and-forth trying to cover everything.

~~~
Adrock
Agreed. We'll improve the description with more visuals. Thanks for the
feedback!

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Adrock
This is a programming competition that was built by two high school interns at
Two Sigma over the summer. We had so much fun playing it that we decided to
open it up to the public. Have fun!

You need to click through the rankings to see the game in action, so here's a
quick link to a recent one:
[https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478809038-259229998.hlt](https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478809038-259229998.hlt)

~~~
Matetricks
I saw their presentation over the summer and was super impressed. I didn't
participate in the initial challenge but I'm excited to start now!

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janzer
Congratulations on your launch and I hope you enjoy running it. It can be a
lot of fun and quite the challenge at times. This looks like a very nice
spiritual successor to the ai challenge ants contest.

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tnecniv
Very similar to the Google AI challenge (the ants one) from a number of years
ago.

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Adrock
Yes! The two interns who built Halite were Ants competitors and were inspired
to build this after participating in that. They tried to come up with
something that had even simpler rules while maintaining a high level of
strategic possibilities.

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drusepth
This looks awesome. We had a very similar competition[1] twice a year at my
university (a group of students created games like this, presented an API to
those interested, and an average of ~100 students hacked away at bots for 24
hours) and I loved it. Will definitely give this a shot.

Related: it seems the winning strategy here is to surround your opponents. Is
there any possible way to come back from being surrounded?

[1]
[https://megaminerai.com/competition/](https://megaminerai.com/competition/)

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trollsche
[https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478706105-405156479.hlt](https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478706105-405156479.hlt)

~~~
Adrock
That one is great. Never give up, never surrender.

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romaniv
Good job on visualization. For something with hundreds of moving pieces, it's
pretty easy to see what's going on on the board.

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Houshalter
This reminds me of [http://vindinium.org/](http://vindinium.org/)

There was a small reddit that used to keep track of games and competitions
like this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gameai/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gameai/)

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mikkom
So when I run the game locally there is no visual feedback at all? Is there
some way to turn visualization on?

~~~
Adrock
On the Visualize tab, you can just drag the .hlt file onto the page to see it.
There was a local visualizer, but we scrapped it to focus on a single
implementation.

The devs are actively monitoring the site's forums and you might want to take
this there.

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a-nikolaev
It would be nice to have a submit file button in addition to drag-and-drop.
Not everyone is using graphical file managers with this interface feature.

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Gorgor
This also makes it difficult to automate. Similarly, maybe I would like to
automatically submit my new bot when I do a commit or a push, but the Submit
button uses Javascript which makes this unnecessarily difficult. (At least for
me.)

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akkartik
Looks like the game is basically Risk but with a different mechanic for adding
armies to territories: instead of choosing where you add them you get them
where you stay still. Is this right? Very nifty!

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Adrock
That's a good way of looking at it. A couple interesting twists are that all
the players move simultaneously and the combat is completely deterministic.

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mntruell
Problems with latency on the site should be fixed now

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dclin2015
Super cool and fascinating project!

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qwertyuiop924
Now if only it supported arbitrary languages.

Or at least a C API, so we could bind it ourselves.

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Adrock
It does!

At launch, there were starter packages for Python, Java, C++, Scala, and Rust.
There's a page describing how to add support for additional languages:

[https://halite.io/advanced_writing_sp.php](https://halite.io/advanced_writing_sp.php)

A few days ago, one competitor submitted the C# package. I wrote the Clojure
one today and should have it up soon.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Thanks. I didn't see this. Sorry.

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darfs
Could be there a precompiled X86 binary for windows too? Q_Q

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jszymborski
Reminds me of the excellent windows torrent client of the same name [1]

[1][https://github.com/Eoinocal/Halite](https://github.com/Eoinocal/Halite)

