
Battlecode – AI Programming Competition - dgellow
http://www.battlecode.org/contestants/
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13years
If anyone is interested in more of these, I'm trying to keep a list here.
[https://github.com/dakaraphi/development-
resources/blob/mast...](https://github.com/dakaraphi/development-
resources/blob/master/README.md#game-based-learning)

~~~
kevinmchugh
I've built two niche games as AI programming games in ruby: Bang!:
[https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/mustached-
nemesis](https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/mustached-nemesis) The Resistance:
[https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/secret-
nemesis](https://github.com/KevinMcHugh/secret-nemesis)

I'd like to find a community to share these with but have no idea what these
things are even called.

~~~
abhorrence
I think it'd be neat to have a coordination service that runs tournaments for
AIs playing games like Resistance. People register a URL with the service that
exposes an API that lets the coordination service tell them the current state
of the game, and responds with their next move, if any. People could then
write these AIs in whatever they want (and bear most of the cost of running
them for tournament style simulation).

~~~
HackBlade
You might be interested in [http://vindinium.org](http://vindinium.org) It has
a REST api so it doesn't matter what language you write your bot in.

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ferdbold
This reminds me of Codingame, they have a similar challenge where you code an
AI for a Dice Wars-like game and send it off to the ladder to compete against
other people. It's great fun

~~~
unoti
I love codingame! I looked into it before recommending it to a friend and got
all sucked in. I'm currently working on an AI bot there for a competition.
It's fun and forcing me to go do research on AI concepts.

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Cixelyn
If anyone is interested in learning more specifically about the Battlecode
competition, I wrote a blog post giving a brief overview of the competition a
few years ago: [http://cory.li/battlecode-intro/](http://cory.li/battlecode-
intro/)

Also, we open sourced our winning 2012 bot on bitbucket here if you want to
see the type of code that goes into it:
[https://bitbucket.org/Cixelyn/bcode2012-bot](https://bitbucket.org/Cixelyn/bcode2012-bot)

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WhitneyLand
Sweet fancy Moses why is MIT still requiring Adobe Flash Player to watch the
results in 2016?

In any case here is a link to the finals on YouTube which works with mobile
devices:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ruUyCbhnWg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ruUyCbhnWg)

~~~
Cixelyn
The "watch" links let you watch the actual battle simulation results in a
really old viewing engine written almost 6+ years ago in Adobe Air. It was
amazing at the time since you didn't have to install the full Java client just
to view the matches.

The devs probably have their hands full implementing the actual game -- pretty
sure no one has had time to port the codebase to something more modern. The
competition organizers are primarily MIT students doing this in their spare
time, so they have classwork and other things to deal with as well. :)

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sliken
Wow, this reminds me of GISMO from 1991 or so. Teams of 8 tanks, 2 bases,
terrain included water, mountains, forests, and plains. Implemented in dos and
required a modem to compete.

Neat framework, well before it's time, very few competitors that worked. They
resisted the recommendation to support TCP instead of modems and linux, even
after it was ported.

It was modeled after the M1 abrams as part of a research project in AI
controlled teams.

I tinkered with it, I liked it because the terrain was complicated enough to
lend itself to quite a few strategies. I've not seen anything similar since.

[http://stars.library.ucf.edu/istlibrary/104/](http://stars.library.ucf.edu/istlibrary/104/)

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javierbyte
Cool! Reminds me of something that I did
[http://javier.xyz/clashjs/](http://javier.xyz/clashjs/) a JS AI battle game
:)

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agilord
Shameful plug: with a few friends we are planning to create another platform
for such fun games. If you think it is a good idea, please sign up:
[https://www.botolympiad.com/](https://www.botolympiad.com/)

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erikb
Is that a remake of the Google AI Challenged that ended after the awesome ant
game?

~~~
sliken
What awesome ant game?

~~~
Steel_Phoenix
This one: [http://ants.aichallenge.org/](http://ants.aichallenge.org/) I
greatly enjoyed it, and it taught me Python. I keep checking back in the hopes
someone will get a new competition together.

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patmcguire
Are there competitive AIs generated by machine learning? Or is it all custom
coded?

~~~
kazimuth
It's generally custom, although we've had teams use ML strategies to tune
their bots in the past. (I'm one of the people who runs this competition).

We impose tight runtime limits on the code your AI can run - generally
limiting the number of bytecodes the JVM can execute per turn per robot. This
is partly pedagogical; it kinda-sorta simulates embedded programming, like for
a real robot. It's also practical; it keeps people from accidentally DOS'ing
themselves or our servers with infinitely-looping AI.

On the other hand, 20000 instructions per turn doesn't give you much leeway
for, say, matrix multiplication, so most sophisticated ML isn't possible at
runtime. You can do simple things, but they have to be tightly written.

~~~
brlewis
What does it mean that "supported programming languages are Java and Scala"?
Are other JVM languages allowed?

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Cixelyn
Other JVM languages are technically allowed, but AFAIK they generate way too
much scaffolding & reflection-based flow such that you end up burning your
entire bytecode computation budget just in calling one or two functions.

So yes, you could probably use Jython or Jruby, but you wouldn't be
competitive against the people writing straight Java.

~~~
brlewis
I bet Kawa Scheme performs well in that regard.

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spullara
I used to play this game back in the day:
[http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/omega_](http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/omega_)

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Iv
"Amaze your future employer!" "Free food!"

I guess that working for free food is pretty amazing for a future employer.

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bogomipz
This was worth reading for the team names alone! Awesome.

