Lisp developer walks away with Google AI contest

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/hungarian-lisp-developer-walks-away-with-google-ai-contest/2131

by janzer • 16 years ago

176 71 16 years ago

silverlake2• 16 years ago

A better title: "3 Time Winner of Computer Games Olympiad Wins Yet Another Contest".

swannodette2• 16 years ago

Can't believe this Reddit quality comment is getting any upvotes. Google AI Challenge is "Yet Another Contest"? Though you may not be surprised, he is, http://quotenil.com/Planet-Wars-Post-Mortem.html/.

eelco• 16 years ago

The point is that he won because he's a great programmer, not because he used Lisp.

phreeza• 16 years ago

His expression of surprise is a reference to the winners post-mortem last round. http://www.a1k0n.net/blah/

silverlake2• 16 years ago

I prefer pithy comments, but I can give you a verbose one too. I've used Lisp professionally for 20 years and I'm a huge fan of the language. But if there are lots of brilliant programmers who use other languages to build brilliant systems, how can I claim my favorite language is superior? The language is less important than the programmer. In this case, the winner has proven he's a very good programmer by winning other contests. The fact that he used Lisp merely shows that it is capable of doing the job.

Programming languages are like basketball shoes. You need a minimum feature set to play safely (ankle support, good traction, comfortable arches, etc). But buying a Nike Zoom Kobe will not make you the next Kobe Bryant. So what's the minimum feature set for a good programming language? I don't know. C appears to be good enough, while assembly is not.

StavrosK2• 16 years ago

Is there a summary of the algorithms he used anywhere? I don't see how it was the language that won the competition, rather than the code he wrote in it.

tudorachim• 16 years ago

Looks like alpha beta with a good evaluation function, move ordering, and a changing depth parameter (not sure about this one, though).

Shamiq2• 16 years ago

Isn't alpha-beta pruning a type of optimization you can do to a search algorithm, but not the base algorithm itself? I only bring this up since I helped make an Othello bot that used Mini-max _with_ alpha-beta pruning to help reduce the number of branches it needed to follow down a tree.

StavrosK2• 16 years ago

Ah, thanks. Nothing that couldn't be implemented in a number of languages, then...

ihodes• 16 years ago

I know at least a few people who had bots written in/were prepared to write bots in Clojure. They didn't end up adding support for it, however. I still can't wait for the next contest—wouldn't Pentarow be cool? Or Pente?

Anyway, cheers to Waterloo for putting this on again!

agravier• 16 years ago

You should beware not to be too enthusiastic, because this year's organizers were pretty aggressive when I politely asked (over PM) if there was any specific problem with adding Clojure. I still don't know what the problem was.

aufreak32• 16 years ago

Hmm .. maybe I should consider settling in Hungary.

to• 16 years ago

food's better and cheaper... thats for sure.

lmaonade• 16 years ago

After seeing Gábor’s performance, many participants commented that they would be taking a new look at the 1000 year old country. "Bocsimako is the proof that Hungary is best for AI algorithms", quipped one player.

eru• 16 years ago

Being born and educated in Hungary is even better. Compare John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner.

They changed the education system, and no longer used the one they had around 1900. Unfortunately.

aufreak32• 16 years ago

Actually I intended my comment to be taken in two ways -

a. really in appreciation of Hungary for all of its contributions to mathematics and the mathematical sciences.

b. I wished to hint that if the author wanted, the same article could've been about Hungary instead of lisp. Instead of asking "what makes lisp so great at this kind of stuff?" the question could've been "what makes Hungary so great at this kind of stuff?", with a badge saying "Made in Hungary". We always focus on the things we want to focus on as causes don't we?

mfukar2• 16 years ago

Not a bad article, but did you have to make the title a Lisp promotion fest?

vixen99• 16 years ago

This very short article mentions the winner's views, as he sees it, on the suitability of Lisp (used by 0.7% of the contestants, surely interesting) for the job. Half the article never even mentions Lisp. And this amounts to a 'promotion fest'?

mfukar2• 16 years ago

The point is that he won because he's a great programmer, not because he used Lisp. I was referring to the title and not the article. Do you understand that or have you got more asinine comments?

lr• 16 years ago

The matrix will be programmed in Lisp...if it's not already...

waqf• 16 years ago

It is already: see http://matrix.itasoftware.com/.

richcollins3• 16 years ago

Bocsimako is the proof that Lisp is best for AI algorithms

Cargo cultism at its finest

swannodette2• 16 years ago

Ugh. Cargo cultism? The full quote is:

After seeing Gábor’s performance, many participants commented that they would be taking a new look at the 50 year old language. “Bocsimako is the proof that Lisp is best for AI algorithms,” quipped one player.

one player.

gruseom5• 16 years ago

And as any reader of the Hardy Boys can tell you, "quipped" implies that it was said in jest.

richcollins3• 16 years ago

Cargo cultism is applicable to one person

ohyes3• 16 years ago

It seems that any positive inclination towards lisp is cargo cultism.

Gabor Melis is a seriously smart guy, and probably would have kicked ass in any language.

That said, I'm going to pull out that phrase next time someone says 'Java/C# is good for Enterprise', or 'C++ is good for video games', or 'C is good for systems programming'.

Cargo cultism indeed.

danparsonson• 16 years ago

Two things:

1) "X is good for Y" is very much not the same thing as "X is best for Y"

2) One person having great success at something is not a pattern, and doesn't usually prove a general rule (I'm hedging with 'usually' - I can't think of a counter example but I expect someone else will :-). Common usage, while not a guarantee, is at least a good indicator of fitness - if Java were better for systems programming than C, it's likely (though of course not certain) that we would be saying 'Java is best for systems programming', and have some basis for that claim beyond the success of one person who has already demonstrated competence in the same general area (i.e. the contests previous competition wins).

The headline might better have been "Experienced programmer uses Lisp to win Google AI contest". Correlation vs causation - he didn't win because he knew Lisp, but he did use Lisp in his winning solution, and you can understand that without taking a position on Lisp itself; there are shades of fanboism in some of the comments on this thread.

lispm• 16 years ago

part of being seriously smart is to use the best tool.

richcollins3• 16 years ago

I don't think you understand the term "cargo cultism"

That the language is Lisp isn't important. The important consideration is that he ascribed the success of the entry to the language without any evidence linking the two.

ld50• 16 years ago

"You can win 6, 12 or 24 months of membership to AiGameDev.com PREMIUM if you place third, second and first in the contest respectively. We'll also provide any single person team that ranks higher than our official bot three months of AiGameDev.com PLUS — our brand-new part of the site that launched last week."

he must be excited. until google puts out non-trivial problem sets and offers non-trivial prizes i'll save my upvotes and cycles.

JoachimSchipper• 16 years ago

Meh, it's worth quite a bit to have that on your resume.

pietrofmaggi• 16 years ago

Lisp was clearly a fine tool for this kind of challenge, but the programmer was, as usual, the important piece of the solution. Otherwise I'll expect to have some other of the 33 lisp based entries in the top spot (the second lisp entry is ranked at the #280 spot: http://ai-contest.com/language_profile.php?lang=Lisp).

What about the top ten solutions? http://ai-contest.com/rankings.php

  4 Java 
  3 C++
  2 C#
  1 Lisp

So is Java the real king of the AI challenge? ;-)

[edit for formatting]

Zak• 16 years ago

I find the mix of languages found in the top 100 interesting. Smart is obviously a big factor in determining the winners. Speed was a factor in the contest as well, with a 1 second per move time limit. Based on that, I'd expect to see the faster of what Paul Graham calls "languages for smart people" near the top. Lisp, Haskell, ML and Lua come to mind. That didn't happen. What follows are observations about things I found interesting, with no specific conclusion:

Popularity in industry seemed to be a big factor, with Java, C++, C# and Python making up most of the entries in the top 100.

Speed wasn't that important: Python made up 20% of the top 100.

Some popular languages, such as Javascript, PHP, Ruby and Perl did quite poorly. I'd blame it on speed, but Python did quite well.

New and exciting languages I'd expect the sort of people who enter programming contests for fun to like were underrepresented. Only 6 people used Go, and 4 used Scala.

Unless I'm mistaken, the contest was limited to supported languages. F#, Clojure, Lua and Scheme don't appear because they weren't supported, not because nobody wanted to use them.

thomas11• 16 years ago

I think a lot of participants might be in the same situation I'm in: I like new and exciting languages and play with them now and then in my free time, but I work in one of the "boring" languages. Having way more experience with the boring language, it's the one I turn to when I have a deadline or the problem is hard enough that I can't afford to spend brain cycles on the language itself.

krmboya• 16 years ago

'Speed wasn't that important: Python made up 20% of the top 100.'

In the article, speedy execution can be taken to mean the speed/ease with which you translate you idea into code and not the speed at which the resulting code runs

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

Unless I'm mistaken, the contest was limited to supported languages. F#, ... don't appear because they weren't supported

I'm not familiar with how the contest was implemented, but I would assume that if C# was supported, then any .Net language would work. It should be trivial to build a C# wrapper for your F# code, if the interface you must support can be implemented in all those other languages.

ctkrohn2• 16 years ago

You could have written a program in any language. It just needed to accept certain command line options and send results to stdout in the proper format. They only provided "starter kits" for a few languages, but if you were willing to write a little extra code, you could have used anything.

aerique3• 16 years ago

Any language you could get working on the official server and you wrote a starter pack for would be supported. That's one of the nice things I like about this challenge as opposed to other competitions which are generally restricted to Java, C# and / or Python.

That said there were quite some initial problems getting some languages working since they were running on a very old Ubuntu.

dkarl• 16 years ago

Speed wasn't that important: Python made up 20% of the top 100.

I wonder if the Python programmers recoded their bottlenecks in C or C++. Would the rules of the contest allow that?

defroost• 16 years ago

Uh...No.

brlewis2• 16 years ago

Yes, the programmer was the important piece of the solution. Note the careful wording the winner used in his advocacy: "Lisp doesn’t get in my way as much as other languages."

From the article's description of how far ahead Melis was (2nd paragraph), you could say Java was king of "a race for second place".

samd• 16 years ago

Don't most Lispers argue that just knowing Lisp makes you a better programmer whether you use it or not? Perhaps a better measure of how great Lisp is would be to examine the proportion of programmers who know Lisp and submitted a top ranking entry.

aerique3• 16 years ago

The language used was only a small factor. I was the next Lisp entry ranked at #280. Programmer quality and experience are far more important.

idan• 16 years ago

Reminds me of a classic comic strip:

http://www.whattheduck.net/strip/95

trezor• 16 years ago

Very interesting stuff. Is the source for the various bots posted anywhere? Is it even a requirement that you disclose your source or that it will be made public after the results are published?

I looked around but couldn't find any obvious place to find the source for the bots used.

dmoney• 16 years ago

The winner: http://quotenil.com/git/planet-wars.git/

aerique3• 16 years ago

There's a thread on the competition's forums: http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1168

Xurinos• 16 years ago

There are many comments here that he won because of his programming/thinking skills versus using the Lisp language, and I think this true in comparison to the other contestants. However, one thing he mentions that is an interesting piece of the puzzle -- and a common theme in language competitions that include Lisp -- is:

Lisp doesn’t get in my way as much as other languages. After getting hooked I learned to value the interactive development environment, the object system, etc.. What’s good about Lisp is rapid development and speedy execution.

This might be a small effect, and you can have good programmers in every language, but if he was just as familiar with Java as he was with Lisp, could he have accomplished the same results in the same time with Java? How would the code look?

Lisp developer walks away with Google AI contest

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