You're right, though, it's definitely not about writing intelligent software. That type of competition would have a much smaller but probably more intensely academic.
There has been talk among the developers of the challenge of offering disk space in on of the future challenges.
Not an easy problem, but perhaps a worthwhile one.
Food for thought, maybe you could develop an ML program to calculate the optimal heuristic for the basic bot program.
There are two things worth pointing out:
1) This competition has previously been sponsored by Google but isn't run by them. It's hosted by the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club.
2) Some people have been working on bots for this challenge for months now, so they are likely to have a bit of a head start.
Those who have been participating in the beta will certainly have a jump on those starting from scratch. But also it should be noted that some of the basic game mechanics were changed about 3 weeks ago, including the scoring and objective of the game. So it may not be quite as much of an advantage as it first appears.
EDIT: I hadn't looked at the leader's games yet... They're already pretty good :)
It's regrettable that the beta did last so long; this has to do mostly with the up-and-down nature of the time volunteers had to work on the project (they have school and work).
So, instead of having to write your AI in the simulator's language you could choose whatever you want. Another advantage is that you could run your own database to store and query information so that your AI could become more intelligent.
I've been looking for a new side project. Perhaps I've found it.
You can also ask the contest organizers to add a compiler/interpreter if anything is missing.
The latency of this approach can start to hurt badly. Even a 100ms latency, multiplied across numerous turns, means that games can drag on for quite a while, reducing the number of games played, and reducing the amount of fun had. I recently ran a contest that did in fact call you as a web service, but we had to basically require that you were hosted in the same city to make it work in anything like a fun time scale.
But feedback is always welcome.
> Any attempt to disrupt the normal operation of the contest software or the contest servers will result in the immediate involvement of law enforcement officials. Our policy is to always prosecute.
I get that people shouldn't be intentionally disrupting the servers, but that sounds like an awful policy.
Certainly it would be more realistic, and I think even more fun--but maybe a little taxing on the server. But this is run by Google, right? Maybe next year.
[0] https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-bin/contest/ants...
Contributions are always welcome.
Or am I missing something?
It's actually run by the University of Waterloo computer science club as an open-source project.
A Clojure package is in the works, I think.
Moving through the operating system meant actually overwriting portions of the operating system as it was running with the running code and the relocating the code to a new location lower down in memory (I've forgotten now but we had some restriction on how far we could jump). Clearly this often meant keeping a cached copy of the memory we were overwriting to put it back, but we could only do that in the operating system itself.
The setup:
* A certain person named Prasand is in my Google contacts, along with his phone number.
* Prasand has recently sent email to me.
* Prasand is a reasonably common name in a certain English-speaking country of well over a billion people.
* A common phrase when calling someone is to say "Hi this is <name>" or "Hey this is <name>"
* Usually this comes near the beginning of the call.
* Prasand probably also has a Google account, and Google probably associates his phone number with his account, and thus can look up interesting things about him, such as his name and various words he is likely to use, by using caller ID when he calls into a Google voice number.
* Google knows my first name. Let's call me Natch.
* Speech recognition can be made more accurate if large quantities of data are available with which to build models of how language is used in context.
* Large data sets are available on the internets. Something tells me Google may even have access to large quantities of data already.
* Google even has the capability, if it wants to, to build user-specific language models.
Google, here is your challenge:
Hire an engineering director for your Google Voice team who can manage to figure out how to do the correct transcription of the following five words at the beginning of a phone call: "Hi Natch, this is Prasand."
Hint 1: you should fire whoever did the one you have right now.
Hint 2: less AI, more common sense.
You don't just need audio data, you also need the correct transcriptions to learn anything from it. This reduces the amount of available data significantly. And producing correct transcriptions is time consuming and expensive.
> The contest is not ready till tomorrow. Everything is still beta today, all accounts so far will be purged tomorrow. ~amstan Contest Organizer
Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lhlt9/googles_a...
You write a robot tank which battles with other tanks.
Not new, did a similar thing in C# in high school. Definitely a good way to get into programming
