May the best Bot win

October 28, 2017 10:20 AM

Halite is an open source artificial intelligence programming challenge where players build bots using the coding language of their choice to battle on a two-dimensional virtual board.

There are multiple paths to take in the challenge, from developping from the provided standard starter bot. To expanding that based on some slightly smarter target choices to taking advantage of extra provided compute resources available to those using machine learning bots.

Even if you don't program, you can watch some of the visuals of the battle, from the starter bots, to the intermediate, to some of the current best.

posted by garlic (6 comments total)

This is cool, but it asked for my work email address to play :(
posted by destructive cactus at 10:32 AM on October 28, 2017

Man, is this a genre that goes way back.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:43 AM on October 28, 2017

See also Screeps.
posted by Nelson at 10:53 AM on October 28, 2017

And Core War, which I always thought was the purest (closest to the metal).
posted by thandal at 10:57 AM on October 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

RoboWar, another entry in the genre (this one for the Mac), had a lot to do with getting me into programming as a kid.
posted by atoxyl at 4:01 PM on October 28, 2017

I don't know: the full demo of a game from getting started crashes my cell phone, and my low level pc (W8.1, runs OK most of the time) appears unable to run the full demo in Firefox nightly.

So, full demo runs 10,000 lines of tight javascript(?). Don't know; will let you all know if I find out anything.

posted by pjmoy at 4:54 PM on October 29, 2017