Battlecode 2015 – AI Programming Competition(battlecode.org) |
Battlecode 2015 – AI Programming Competition(battlecode.org) |
It would be interesting to see a game where only the API for the bot is exposed, and the actual computation takes place on a separate machine (or same machine, but separate processor). That way you can experiment with all kinds of languages, or even possible hardware combinations. For competition your code would be loaded on a VM instance or a physical machine which has identical characteristics to all the other competing machines, and you go at it. This way you are not limited to a given language or a set of libraries, and can really explore all the possibilities.
> What are the supported programming languages?
Java and Scala.
What's the most interesting version of a competition like this which doesn't place restrictions on implementation language?
If there are other JVM languages people want supported, we'd be happy to take pull requests on Github once we make the new gameplay public tomorrow.
- Is it measuring the count and making sure it doesn't exceed some threshold, or is the client API designed to actually give each client a specific number of instructions and terminate if that is exceeded?
- Does "machine independent" mean it needs to run outside of x86/amd64?
- Would it offend your sensibilities if CPU cycles used by C programs counted the same as those used by JVM programs?
edit: Perhaps I should explain. I dabbled in rec.games.corewars a few times, and what I found most rewarding was all the tricks you could play with the bytecode. I've never found the Java variants as fun, as one fun part of the game seems lost. I feel like I'm missing something.
Should be fun anyway.
>In order to be eligible to compete in the seeding, qualifying, and final tournaments, at least half of your team members must be current students (any school).
Machine-independent isn't really the write word, more of that we want the same two bots fighting on the same maps to be deterministic regardless of the machine its being run on.
For mechanics like this, we've found that bytecode instruction counts are the best metric we currently have, since anything that is time-based could result in different results depending how the CPU schedules the bots, and doing something like using PIN or another system to count assembly instructions turns it into a competition of who can write the most optimized assembly code.