From the rules[1]: Programming languages that are currently available for selection are C, C# / Mono, Clojure, CoffeeScript, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, Go. At the moment, due to technical reasons, we cannot 100% guarantee that all of these will be supported, but we'll do our best. You can change the programming language at any time.
From the rules[1]:
"The six teams that fight their way to the finals will receive a four-day, all-expenses paid trip to Helsinki, Finland. The trip will include great company, delicious food and one heck of a tour in the capital city of Finland."
Yes. Sorry, I was reading below, but that was another event:
"All six finalist teams will get exclusive tickets to the to-be-sold-out tech conference of the year Reaktor Dev Day, worth 500e/piece. More information on the conference. Travel and accommodations costs are not included."
It's not so easy to enable - there are no simple, reasonably automated and secure ways to deploy,run&evaluate solutions developed in/for an arbitrary environment; there are multi-language code-evaluation environments that allow to do this for many but not all languages.
You don't want to run arbitrary binaries; linking of required libraries is an issue in many languages, and you can't install every version of every possible interpreter in the world to support all possible interpreted languages (and their multiple, incompatible versions).
Was about to apply but I'm confused about the rules requiring all members to be the same nationality.
I have a French passport, so my nationality would legally be French, but I live in the UK, and work with English, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian developers(all living and working in the UK), some of whom I was considering asking to join a team with me. I think this rule needs some amendment.
Edit: also to explain some more, my French passport is a consequence of some awkward laws - I was born in the UK and have lived here all my life and can't even speak the language of my legal nationality. If I happened to win I wouldn't like to be a representative of "France" and I really dislike this "Passport must match" for the team - it makes no sense.
(Disclaimer: I'm not part of the organizing team, but I do work for Reaktor - so this is just my opinion, not an official position.) As I've understood, the same country requirement works just like in sports: you need to be a citizen of the country if you want to play in the national team.
I would suggest contacting the organizers about your situation.
I think that comparison is flawed as there's only one team per country (and discipline) sent to e.g. the Soccer World Cup or the Olympic Games, whereas here it could be potentially way more.
As a sibling already mentioned: there shouldn't be any artificial borders in a global (hacker) community.
It would be a shame if they disqualified me/us. I'm in this for fun. I guess everyone is. If I can travel freely in Europe and have no problems being in a "German" team, I think there mustn't be any problems.
I agree. The main point of this competition is fun - having beta tested the system I can promise that writing bots and watching them compete is a lot of fun. I hope your team can participate.
> The server will send you track details and car positions and your job is to send car control messages to the server. You'll communicate with a game server using JSON over TCP. More details will be delivered later.”
I don't understand how this could work for a real-time game. I don't know what the input format is like but assuming you need to provide control commands eg:
{accelerate:1.0, steer:-0.01, brake:0}
Then the behaviour of my car depends wholly on when that command arrives at the server. If there is a small delay it could have a dramatic effect on the position of the car. Similarly, my AI needs to react to information sent by the server which similarly could be delayed when sending over TCP.
Assuming the input format is the actual status of the car, eg:
{positionx:123, positiony:234}
Then what is to stop me from submitting illegal inputs? Validation might work but it will be impossible for me to validate the output of my AI without access to the simulation code (apparently that is being kept closed source).
Maybe there is another technical solution I haven't thought of? Or maybe the simulation won't run in realtime but will actually work on fixed time steps?
Very good question :) The message protocol is synchronized because of latency. When the developers test their bots against the game servers, the server allows long response times. When automated races are run in the cloud (with low latency), the response times need to be more strict.
Can you test your own bots? As far as I can tell, the rules only specify that they're automatically tested daily. I'd like the ability to test whenever I need to.
Unfortunately due budget constraints we can't allow unlimited access to test game servers. Do you have an estimate on how many rounds would you need to evolve the algorithm enough?
The Google AI challenges allowed one to run a game server locally so testing was only limited by one's own resources. (A bot made using genetic programming did pretty well: http://planetwars.aichallenge.org/profile.php?user_id=4038)
Are there any limitations on the licensing of my AI (didn't see anything on the front page rules)? I'm somewhat concerned this is just an cool way of outsourcing the AI development for one of their mobile games :D
[at the very least it seems like a smart investment for recruiting]
Otherwise the competition seems cool and Helsinki is a nice place. Will certainly think about participating. All members being from the same country is a strange constraint though. I was actually looking forward to using this as an opportunity to co-develop with some US-based friends (I get why it's done though but I think allowing multi-country teams and having them participate as the country of the majority of the team members could have worked).
Edit: The screen shot makes me think it'll be a 3d game but since one of the company behind this is in mobile games it could be 2d (micro machines style). That's one point that should be clarified. Some more info would be helpful as well i.e. how is the world represented, what can we control etc.
It sounds like a cool competition, but it would be nice if they gave a little more explanation about their technical solution. If it's true that the only way to test your bot is by uploading it to them and waiting for the CI to finish (once per day), then that's not very nice at all.
Will the participants get an environment in which they can test their bots outside of the competition CI?
Servers are available for testing during development, running the code on your own computer - the CI server is useful in that it verifies that your code compiles and runs on the linux machine used during the competition.
During the finals yes. The qualifying round is run with standardized virtual linux boxes, so all bots must have the same build and run scripts. With the amount of participants we're expecting, it wouldn't be possible to run the competitions manually.
C code isn't necessarily more efficient; it's definitely possible to write slow C code if you make poor choices, and the performance-critical work in python can be written in C (it might be already, e.g. if you're using numpy). And if the performance is IO-bound (e.g. communicating with their server), there might be a negligible difference anyway. Also, being high-level can give a big advantage in development time and bug prevention which is more likely than response time to be where things get difficult.
Right, but what's he's getting at is: will a bot that responds faster have an advantage over one that responds slower, even if both respond within the time time limit? Or, is the server waiting for both responses to come in before progressing the world state?
I don't want to give any information out before it's revealed to everyone, it wouldn't be fair. I'll just say that the response speed does matter, but at least in our beta tests the benefit of using one language over another was how productive the team was - so I would recommend choosing the language you're most comfortable with. Anyways, you can switch language at any point.
Ah, I see. Well, I misunderstood the question I guess. I'm not sure why my answer was downvoted, however, seeing as I don't think I said anything incorrect, and it is a reasonable (though incorrect) understanding of what he was asking. Namely, responding to the implication that a C bot will be necessarily faster than a python bot.
Forgive me for my density, but I'm still uncertain as to what "this country" means. Does this mean that at least one member of the team must be from Finland?
Well it says " All team members must have passports valid up until at least July 5th 2014. Finalists will be required to travel to Helsinki, Finland for the onsite finals. Any finalist who is unable to obtain appropriate travel documents, such as a passport or visa, may be disqualified from the onsite finals and an alternative finalist may be selected." https://helloworldopen.com/rules
so I would suppose that if you get to the finals (meaning to be in the top two teams of your region), then yes you must all travel to Finland, but expenses paid.
However, the qualifying rounds are organised via Internet, so the vast majority of teams will not need to travel. Of course Helsinki in June is a really nice place to visit if you want to come on your own and check out the finals live ;)
This sounds exciting, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in thinking that coding an AI for a race car bot is at least as interesting as the final prize.
Will the server be open-sourced later ? I think it would be awesome to be able build a bot at home.
Yeah, I understand you don't release the code during the competition so as to not make it too easy for competitors :)
I think building such a bot can be a very interesting exercise at AI and realtime programmation, which is why I'm interested in the potential educational aspects of it.
Its a good guess that the simulator or game engine behind this competetion is TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator) [1].
Simulated Car Racing (SCR) [2], is an existing annual AI car racing competition based on TORCS, though without the attractive prizes. It also has a client-server architecture with controls and sensor information sent over UDP using what seem like lisp sexps.
Signed up in the hope to find some time to have a go at this. But it would be great to have some idea what the task will be beyond "creating a race car bot".
There is a slightly longer description in the Technical Instructions section on the Rules page (https://helloworldopen.com/rules):
“The goal is to create an AI for a simple real time racing game. Your AI will sit on the drivers seat of a racing car and race against others AIs on different virtual tracks. The server will send you track details and car positions and your job is to send car control messages to the server. You'll communicate with a game server using JSON over TCP. More details will be delivered later.”
I wish I knew specifically what kind of data we would be given.
For example, is track details a 3d representation of the map to use for collision detection, the weather in a particular scenario. How much detail do we have for the cars? Drag coefficient, acceleration, max speed, bounding box?
We're trying to keep the competition both fun and challenging so the simulation is kept fairly simple. More details will be revealed when competition starts.
There are no clear rules regarding rights in the code submitted, but the combination of "All content the team provides can be used for marketing purposes without notifying the team by the organizers of Hello World Open 2014." and "Reaktor may change these rules, the contest or its prizes, at any time for any reason without incurring liability to any of the contestants." aren't exactly comforting.
Unfortunately due budget constraints we can't allow unlimited access to test game servers. Do you have an estimate on how many rounds would you need to evolve the algorithm enough?
I don't have a passport, and even if I did and I were to miraculously become a finalist, I've already got other obligations for the first weekend in June, so no formal entry from me.
BUT I'd still like to compete, is there anyway someone can unofficially compete?
From the rules[1]: Programming languages that are currently available for selection are C, C# / Mono, Clojure, CoffeeScript, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, Go. At the moment, due to technical reasons, we cannot 100% guarantee that all of these will be supported, but we'll do our best. You can change the programming language at any time.
[1] https://helloworldopen.com/rules