from Hacker News

Halite: An AI Programming Challenge

by Adrock on 11/10/16, 7:56 PM with 33 comments

  • by danielvf on 11/10/16, 9:15 PM

  • by maaaats on 11/10/16, 9:55 PM

    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.
  • by Adrock on 11/10/16, 8:01 PM

    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!

    You 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

  • by janzer on 11/10/16, 9:30 PM

    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.
  • by tnecniv on 11/10/16, 8:39 PM

    Very similar to the Google AI challenge (the ants one) from a number of years ago.
  • by drusepth on 11/10/16, 11:55 PM

    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?

    [1] https://megaminerai.com/competition/

  • by romaniv on 11/11/16, 5:38 PM

    Good job on visualization. For something with hundreds of moving pieces, it's pretty easy to see what's going on on the board.
  • by Houshalter on 11/11/16, 11:26 AM

    This reminds me of http://vindinium.org/

    There was a small reddit that used to keep track of games and competitions like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gameai/

  • by mikkom on 11/10/16, 9:45 PM

    So when I run the game locally there is no visual feedback at all? Is there some way to turn visualization on?
  • by akkartik on 11/11/16, 6:17 PM

    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!
  • by mntruell on 11/10/16, 11:13 PM

    Problems with latency on the site should be fixed now
  • by dclin2015 on 11/11/16, 3:17 AM

    Super cool and fascinating project!
  • by qwertyuiop924 on 11/10/16, 10:26 PM

    Now if only it supported arbitrary languages.

    Or at least a C API, so we could bind it ourselves.

  • by darfs on 11/11/16, 1:41 PM

    Could be there a precompiled X86 binary for windows too? Q_Q
  • by jszymborski on 11/10/16, 10:03 PM

    Reminds me of the excellent windows torrent client of the same name [1]

    [1]https://github.com/Eoinocal/Halite