This looks ace. I haven't looked into it much, but is not knowing either of the languages going to be an issue? Or should I be able to pick up what I need easily?
I would say the programming skills requirement for the game is just beginner level. At least that was my hope making it. If those languages are new to you it will take a little overhead but not much.
I'd be willing to give it a shot if you would like to partner up. I have reasonable (for some value) math chops. Email me at infrec.obs@gmail.com if you are interested.
Time-wise I can commit only a couple of hours a week so I don't expect much but it seems like it could be fun.
> In the unlikely case something very bad happens to bitcoins between now and then (or ours are stolen or become unavailable for reasons outside our control), we reserve the right to pay $2,000USD instead.
Does this go both ways? What if Bitcoins are worth $500 USD at come award time? Will you still be paying in BTC, or will you just pay $2,000 USD instead?
Nope, I will pay in bitcoins. I fully intend to pay in bitcoins (which I have set aside), regardless of the value, but reserve the right to pay in cash in case something happens to mine AND they become ridiculously expensive. I would pay $500/coin to buy them back in the case you describe. I would not pay $10,000/coin, however, if my 10 were stolen. Just protecting myself and my family from a crazy event.
Fair enough, just thought I'd ask. :) I can't even view the site properly because of my work proxy, but I'm interested in taking a look later and perhaps participating.
Might I suggest transferring the 10 btc to a custom wallet with a single address in it, encrypting the wallet and simply putting it online for everyone to see/download. The winner gets the password to the wallet.
Um, there was definitely DDOS'ing going on. I witnessed it myself with a bunch of other sites (bitcointalk, bitstamp, bitcoincharts etc). Mt Gox was trying to do damage control and spin it positively. That failed and now they are reporting DDOS again.[1][2]
"@MtGox Maintenance Over however we are now under a DDoS attack." [1]
Mt Gox has taken a credibility knock, which has a ripple effect on the BTC pricing right now.
Overall it probably a temporary setback, but does bring to light irrational exuberance voices ignoring others that were calling for a more decentralized ingress/egress between USD and BTC. IOW bitcoin needs more exchanges to drive competition, and perhaps even meta-exchanges too.
What evidence do you have that each of these sites weren't going down just because of real high traffic?
I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think that each of those sites would have naturally seen their greatest traffic surge with the events of yesterday. For example, over 20% of all subscribers were present on /r/bitcoin (for comparison, (eg) /r/android is currently at about 0.5%, /r/bitcoin is around 10% now).
What's even more remarkable, is these posters on here and other forums, (and even the media outlets), are saying that - an influx of buyers, and a de-flux of markets, is causing Bitcoins to drop from $250 down to $60! Lol. That's pretty much the opposite of what logic and reason say should happen.
MtGox has to be where market manipulators live - and they run the coin prices up every day. Now that it's not trading at the moment over there, the real demand is meeting the real supply.
If they stay shut down for a while longer, it will give all the horders and speculators a chance to rightfully panic and sell. $60 is not the bottom.
That's a function in one of the sample codes I wrote, so it should be in the same file you encountered it. It likely uses some of the lib functions defined on the documentation page.
You are free to analyze existing recordings, if you like. So you could make entries and study their recordings. I don't intend to document them during the contest, though. As for sending info out during the battle, probably not. Although - you are free to do that with the sandbox, of course. It all runs in your browser.
What's up with the sign up form? What the hell does @name mean?
A twitter username? Does it have to be twitter? Is it just a regular username? Then why does it have an @ sign? Do I need to enter an @ sign or are you going to prepend it after I submit the form?
Edit: okay, so it prepends the @ as you type. Now I'm even more confused about whether or not it's supposed to be my twitter username or not.
Edit 2: Signed up, seems to be just a username. The website refers to usernames in the same way as twitter? The top bar says '@<username>' and links to the account settings. On the home page it links two @usernames to twitter, not a website profile. On the ladder, it shows more @usernames but don't link to twitter and look like they will link to user profiles.
Please don't mix twitter usernames with your site's usernames, it's confusing, especially when some are internal links and some are twitter links.
Anyways, awesome site, reminds me of the google ai challenges. I hope you keep this open perpetually though, or keep running different challenges. Sucks that the google ai challenges only run once a year.
The browser version runs in a WebWorker (each team gets one). I didn't even know what WebWorkers were before I programmed this. The server side runs in a NodeJS process (each team gets its own), and your code runs in a fresh VM context. These both provide commonly expected JS such as Math and Date, but not other stuff such as console (which I provide in the webworker case and send messages back to the browser).
Any plans to release the nodejs code? Coding in the browser is ok, but it'd be much nicer to be able to code in my usual editor and test locally using the nodejs version.
Yeah, I signed up too, I never said the sign up form was difficult. Doesn't solve the mystery of whether this has anything to do with your twitter account, since there's no reason why that @ sign should be there.
My edits make the comment a bit dramatic, but that wasn't my intention.
i would love to be able to use machine learning with this. for example, if you released the "universe simulator" in a binary/open source would be more than enough to start.
any thoughts on this from the creators of the project?
I like the idea, never participated in this kind of competition. However I had to write an AI for a same kind of game in college. It was a 2d football simulater and we had to write the AI in haskell. The tactics however had nothing to do with real life football (rushing was the best strategy). Does anybody here know if this is an evolution of an existing game, or did the creators invented this game by their self's?
Cool. I've played with a few of these over the past several years but the problem was typically few participants and no incentive to win. This one shouldn't have either problem, plus it's not C++! (I hope they get ClojureScript working in the next few days, but JS is so much better for this sort of thing than C++...) How often do ladder matches get scheduled and played?
Thanks! If you want to use ClojureScript, maybe just work in an editor of your choice and paste into the site for now. I do that anyway when I play with it, as I prefer Sublime to Ace.
Right now it starts a game 1 minute after the previous one ends. I will likely speed that up as the number of submissions increases.
It looks like the API doesn't give access to the whole shape of a ship - only its centroid position and the direction of the sharpest vertex. Do the other vertices not matter? In any case, we should probably be able to compute which edge we would be splitting and stuff like that.
They matter in that they might ram you :-). You also have another ship's moment of inertia, which tells you something about it. But no, you're not provided other ships' geometries. I could change this, but likely not during the contest.
for luddites, 10 Btc = $300-2000 depending on the exchange rates of the past two months, or even possibly $5000 by the time you win. Possibly a quite uncertain prize!
The certain prize for me is having fun and learning CoffeeScript and physics. That's really more than I'd expect from any game :) The 10 BTC would be nice, but meh.
This is uncertain. The game steps at a specific rate (the physics is deterministic) but does not wait for callbacks from your AI to proceed with the game. If a specific ship hasn't replied to the last request for instructions, the game won't call it the next round. I was thinking that rather than providing the game step in the API, the simplest thing is for an AI to study the gametime and draw its own conclusions.
After playing around with it for a while, it hasn't actually made that much difference to me. I perhaps shouldn't have made the suggestion so hastily ;)
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadTime-wise I can commit only a couple of hours a week so I don't expect much but it seems like it could be fun.
I know a bit of JavaScript, but my math intuition is somewhat poor as well, so it'd be more so I can learn than anything else.
Downloading a replay is taking a very long time. Also, is there an easy way to plot things like projection vectors?
Edit: This appears to be a chrome specific issue.
Firefox Nightly v23.0a1
Does this go both ways? What if Bitcoins are worth $500 USD at come award time? Will you still be paying in BTC, or will you just pay $2,000 USD instead?
"@MtGox Maintenance Over however we are now under a DDoS attack." [1]
Mt Gox has taken a credibility knock, which has a ripple effect on the BTC pricing right now.
Overall it probably a temporary setback, but does bring to light irrational exuberance voices ignoring others that were calling for a more decentralized ingress/egress between USD and BTC. IOW bitcoin needs more exchanges to drive competition, and perhaps even meta-exchanges too.
[1] https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/322281690309468160
[2] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/456123227805423
I don't think it's at all unreasonable to think that each of those sites would have naturally seen their greatest traffic surge with the events of yesterday. For example, over 20% of all subscribers were present on /r/bitcoin (for comparison, (eg) /r/android is currently at about 0.5%, /r/bitcoin is around 10% now).
I'll see if I can dig up sources.
MtGox has to be where market manipulators live - and they run the coin prices up every day. Now that it's not trading at the moment over there, the real demand is meeting the real supply.
If they stay shut down for a while longer, it will give all the horders and speculators a chance to rightfully panic and sell. $60 is not the bottom.
Cool idea moving it into modern JS environment.
A twitter username? Does it have to be twitter? Is it just a regular username? Then why does it have an @ sign? Do I need to enter an @ sign or are you going to prepend it after I submit the form?
Edit: okay, so it prepends the @ as you type. Now I'm even more confused about whether or not it's supposed to be my twitter username or not.
Edit 2: Signed up, seems to be just a username. The website refers to usernames in the same way as twitter? The top bar says '@<username>' and links to the account settings. On the home page it links two @usernames to twitter, not a website profile. On the ladder, it shows more @usernames but don't link to twitter and look like they will link to user profiles.
Please don't mix twitter usernames with your site's usernames, it's confusing, especially when some are internal links and some are twitter links.
Anyways, awesome site, reminds me of the google ai challenges. I hope you keep this open perpetually though, or keep running different challenges. Sucks that the google ai challenges only run once a year.
What kind of environment does the code execute in? What standard javascript functions/libraries do we have access to?
I typed in a username in the field and pressed enter. It worked fine. Mystery solved.
My edits make the comment a bit dramatic, but that wasn't my intention.
edit: specifically, the part at the end when the moons fly off the screen, the world shrinks to nothing, and the counter on the right expands wildly.
any thoughts on this from the creators of the project?
http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/
Right now it starts a game 1 minute after the previous one ends. I will likely speed that up as the number of submissions increases.
Really great fun to play. I love it.