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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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!
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.
