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!
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.
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.
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.)
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 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?
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.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 68.7 ms ] threadYou 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=ar1478706105-405156479.hlt
The devs are actively monitoring the site's forums and you might want to take this there.
[1]https://github.com/Eoinocal/Halite
Or at least a C API, so we could bind it ourselves.
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
A few days ago, one competitor submitted the C# package. I wrote the Clojure one today and should have it up soon.
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/
There was a small reddit that used to keep track of games and competitions like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gameai/