Open Invitation to help design a programming game for FRC

[faust1706]

Originally Posted by AlexanderTheOK

In the meantime, I've found robocode to be an amazing exercise in autonomous programming. Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to set up a competition surrounding it, and livestream official battles between submissions?

Heck. I'll do that. Who's with me? I have 4mbps up so I should be fine streaming 720p on twitch.

This is a great idea. Set up a server than organizes and runs games with the code submissions and have a real time leaderboard then at the end have a tournament of everyone's latest code.

[Jon Stratis]

For students that want an added programming challenge, I recommend checking out https://projecteuler.net. Tons of problems, many of which explore interesting solutions - you may be able to quickly come up with a solution that solves a problem, but that program then takes hours to run. A little more thinking and focus will get you a program that can solve the same problem in under a minute. The problems are designed to make you think about efficiency, and good programming practices make solving them easier - many problems deal with similar topics, so creating utility classes to hold common algorithms will help a lot. I've challenged my students in the past to tackle some of them!

The best part? Language doesn't matter, the hardware your running it on doesn't matter. Once you solve it, you get access to a forum thread about the problem, allowing you to see other solutions in a dozen different languages!. It's a great learning tool, in my opinion.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by AlexanderTheOK

In the meantime, I've found robocode to be an amazing exercise in autonomous programming. Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to set up a competition surrounding it, and livestream official battles between submissions?

Heck. I'll do that. Who's with me? I have 4mbps up so I should be fine streaming 720p on twitch.

Originally Posted by faust1706

This is a great idea. Set up a server than organizes and runs games with the code submissions and have a real time leaderboard then at the end have a tournament of everyone's latest code.

I have been interested in trying RoboCode in the past. If I can find the time (30%? chance) I would want to give it a try.

I was/am little hesitant because I would think that optimal strategies already exist for any default configuration of the playing field; but maybe not; and/or maybe the playing field is easily customized enough to keep the competition(s) interesting.

One of my dreams when we were developing the 5th Gear FRC simulations was exposing an API that would let users compete in fully autonomous matches (neural nets could be trained, heuristics could be developed, etc.); but there are only so many hours in the day, and we were never able to get that far with any of the the 5th Gear simulations (close, but nothing was ever really deployable).

Finally, the MIT BattleCode tools should get a look. At one time I tried to contact someone to learn more about them, but never got a reply. Someone should try again (or maybe Woodie still has some pull back on campus? ).

[AlexanderTheOK]

Originally Posted by faust1706

This is a great idea. Set up a server than organizes and runs games with the code submissions and have a real time leaderboard then at the end have a tournament of everyone's latest code.

I was actually thinking of something a bit more fun, have actual live battles (best out of 10?) akin to what MIT does for battle code. Maybe add some inaccurate commentary on the various strategies. Not quite as good at telling which program is the "best" but at least a tad interesting.