I've been waiting to see if someone implements an AI bot that's trained on all the bots in the competition but maybe you just don't need to.
I took Robocode[1], made a basic Robot class that the kids could easily extend, and then taught them just enough logic and syntax so they could have their robots battle their classmates'.
It was a huge success. We had to close the door to the classroom because the kids were so loud, cheering their robots on.
Whenever a kid was called by the teacher to do their one-on-one, they protested "one more minute, I need to improve my robot!"
In September, my daughter starts university in software engineering; mission accomplished! ;)
Then in (conventional) high school I hosted a workshop on beginning Python (with Turtle) and half the people couldn’t understand why x=2 after “x=1” and “x+=1”.
I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/
Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified.
Never heard of Faas Wars but now I'm excited to see what it is like. These programming-based games are way more fun, IMHO, than hackathons.
The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores.
I wonder if one could make a better ML system than genetic programming for creating CoreWar warriors. Perhaps a neural net connected to a differentiable SAT solver?
That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much./
In fact, it's been about 12 years since I last played around with CoreWars, so I'm not up on the newest theories.
It would be interesting to see how a genetic algorithm fares against current ML strategies. I'm completely in the dark as to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero work, I only know classifiers/SSD/autoencoders. Would be fun to learn with this environment tho.
Don't expect too much -- I just made this for fun :)
