Code robots in Python. Fight other players. Climb to the top

by yasyfm • 13 years ago

158 44 13 years ago

This isn't specifically about this implementation, but I've noticed perhaps almost ten similar projects (virtual, programmed PCROBOTS descendants) on HN over the past year. There seems to be a real interest in this area (I made one myself on a hack day a few years ago ;-)) but a lot of reinventing the wheel.

Are there are any particularly popular open source projects of this sort that people interested in this area could perhaps collaborate around?

ColinWright2• 13 years ago

The C++Robots combat engine is available for download:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748373

http://www.gamerz.net/c++robots/

http://www.gamerz.net/c++robots/c++robots.tar.gz

jacques_chester3• 13 years ago

The Urgame for this seems to be RobotWar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar

Which I'm aware of because it inspired Robot Battle:

http://www.robotbattle.com/

Which inspired RoboCode:

http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

Which seems to have inspired a lot of others.

(Reads a bit like the Old Testament; all that begetting.)

One problem is that almost all of them are language-specific. Robot Battle implemented its own language, RoboCode uses Java, this game is in Python.

One game in the genre is RealTimeBattle, which instead allows bots to communicate with the game simulator via standard IPC. So, in theory, robot programs can be written in a variety of languages.

http://realtimebattle.sourceforge.net/

dserban• 13 years ago

"One problem is that almost all of them are language-specific."

Shameless plug: I built a platform [0] like this - but language-agnostic - for use during hackathons at the local TU's department of CS / software engineering. By language-agnostic I mean both bots and engines can be written in any programming language one prefers, as long as that language can encode/decode JSON. Three game engines are ready, one more (called Trapdoor Reversi) is in the planning stages. I've already gotten enthusiastic feedback from a group of sophomores at a recent hackathon.

If anyone finds it interesting, please star the repo.

[0] https://github.com/rosedu/I.GameBot

pudquick• 13 years ago

Actually, the real original was a bit farther back - Darwin (which later inspired Core War):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(programming_game)

http://code.wikia.com/wiki/Core_War

mkramlich• 13 years ago

The ideal language-agnostic "robot wars" engine would prob involve just passing structured text messages over a socket via TCP. Then the robot's logic can be written in anything, as long as it could do sockets (which almost every language/stdlib/runtime/OS you care about can do already), and, could be running remotely or locally.

aymeric• 13 years ago

I have open sourced terrarium.js: http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net

You program herbivores and carnivores and try to invade other people's terrariums.

Your creatures can see, move, attack, defend, reproduce, eat.

ColinWright2• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the C++Robots "King of the Hill" competition:

http://www.gamerz.net/c++robots/

I've still got two robots in the top ten there, and another just outside.

thejosh• 13 years ago

Down now.

yasyfm• 13 years ago

Looks like it's back up!

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

previous discussion thread (3 weeks ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6656419

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

in this case, the author iterated significantly since the last post, now there's an online code editor, and it's easy to try out

alexchamberlain2• 13 years ago

It seems a large part of the previous discussion surrounded sandboxing Python; anyone know where the author is with that? I find it hard to believe it would be very hard if you just embed the players game in a C++ engine.

_xhok5• 13 years ago

Well, it turns out you can't sandbox Python at the language level. So now each user's code is run (a) in a separate process (b) in a chroot jail (c) as user nobody (d) with umask set to 0 (e) with a time limit of 300ms.

krallin• 13 years ago

I thought pypy had a sandboxed mode, did you get to experiment with it? if you did, what did you think?

dbaupp• 13 years ago

Have you experimented with using linux's cgroups for real security? (e.g. you can white/black-list specific syscalls, set time & memory limits etc, all at the kernel level)

Example sandbox: https://github.com/thestinger/playpen

jnbiche• 13 years ago

pypy has a fairly advanced sandbox, and as a side effect your code will probably run faster.

_xhok5• 13 years ago

Also, with network connections firewalled via iptables.

LoneWolf• 13 years ago

My first thought went to http://aichallenge.org/ it's a shame there is still no new competition.

_xhok5• 13 years ago

I saw AI Challenge earlier! It looks really fun. I might steal one of their ideas and of put five or so teams of robots in a bigger map and see what happens.

joosters• 13 years ago

Why python? The API could have been a simple textual one (or maybe JSON, or whatever) and piped to/from the robot programs. That way, robots could be written in whatever language the authors like. It would also help sandbox the robots from the game server.

wiremine• 13 years ago

My guess is one of the project's goals it to reach programming. If that is the case, Python is a great language.

If the goal was simply to make fighting robots, something more agnostic would be cool. That said, the system enforces a 300ms response time per robot, so compiled languages would have a big advantage.

alexchamberlain2• 13 years ago

This is how we should teach kids programming; the goal is simple, the API is simple and they can play against their friends... This has got me thinking...

jlas• 13 years ago

The intro to programming class I took at CMU (Fall of '05) was pretty much this. We learned Java using a robot simulator. It was based on Karel the Robot, adapted for Java: http://www.amazon.com/Karel-Robot-Introduction-Object-Orient...

jtfairbank• 13 years ago

Every year the UofI ACM puts on an AI programming game competition. I've competed and worked on the 2012 game, its a lot of fun. If you're a student or corp in the midwest, take a trip down in October. And the game is usually language agnostic.

Did I mention there's also a whole conference with a bunch of tech talks, student parties, etc?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechMania

matmann2001• 13 years ago

I-L-L!

ElongatedTowel2• 13 years ago

I always get a maximum recursion depth exceeded exception in game.py using the rgkit. The exceptions aren't very helpful and only point to problems in the runner, not the bot. I'm not even sure what is triggering it. The only rg method I'm using is locs_around.

ElongatedTowel2• 13 years ago

Seems to happen whenever I use locs_around. I think I'll replace that method with my own. Half my robots are guarding because this function is hitting recursion limits every god damn time.

phreeza2• 13 years ago

Heh this reminds me of a game I wrote a while back, also python: https://github.com/phreeza/cells In fact I would guess the API is perhaps inspired by the cells API.

Writing a web frontend is something I have been wanting to do for this a long time, nice to see someone implement that!

pavel_lishin• 13 years ago

I really wanted to play with that, but it ran far too slowly without PyGame, and I couldn't get PyGame to run on my mac, so I abandoned it :/

phreeza2• 13 years ago

Thats a shame, if I recall correctly for me it was trivial to set up with macports.

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

This also quite interesting programming game, which allows several optimizations. http://aichallenge.org/ I also used to play Omega Tank, but it wasn't as good as it could have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_%28video_game%29

abus• 13 years ago

Please use <title> so I can tell the tabs apart.

_xhok5• 13 years ago

Good idea, thanks for the suggestion.

imdsm• 13 years ago

This would be better if there were more in-depth docs. I want to know if my a bot is on my team? But how? Let's check the docs..oh wait..they're incomplete.

Promising but not ready yet.

_xhok5• 13 years ago

Yeah, I do need to make the docs friendlier. As for your question, though:

    if bot.player_id == self.player_id:
        # they're on your team!

mabbo• 13 years ago

Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but nearly every robot I write compiles, and then does nothing when run.

The only time I got it to do something else was by taking the sample code, raw copy-pasting it in, and running that.

QuasiAlon• 13 years ago

Anybody aware of a similar game to ~teach~ python? I remember seeing a thread that used a war game to teach java, was hoping there's one for python too cheers

monkeypizza• 13 years ago

http://www.hacker.org/bitbath/ is a really nice one in Java.

And this one is ok, http://berlin-ai.com/ - you just provide the URL of your AI and they POST game states to you, and you have 5 seconds to reply with your orders.

Code robots in Python. Fight other players. Climb to the top

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