[HN Gopher] I built my first serverless robot and won $1000 ___________________________________________________________________ I built my first serverless robot and won $1000 Author : thomasj Score : 117 points Date : 2021-07-21 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (towardsdev.com) (TXT) w3m dump (towardsdev.com) | rabbah wrote: | I watched the youtube videos of all the battles so far and I was | really surprised to see that a very simple strategy (in | retrospect) was sufficient to win the competitions. | | 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. | ska wrote: | In most of these sorts of competition environments, it's a lot | less work (and cheaper) to make a competitive hand-tuned | algorithm that a really competitive AI version. If you are | already working on a similar training environment with a bunch | of free/cheap compute jumping in for a weekend or whatever | could give decent results, but otherwise you're likely going to | get destroyed by bespoke tactics. | msciabarra wrote: | Actually the discussion of using an AI trained robot has been | frequently discussed on the various forums. Nimbella has even | an "python ai" runtime that would support it. However does not | seem the winning robots actually uses any A.I. | tout wrote: | That's very much something that happens in Battlesnake[1]! | There's a fun Go Time episode about it all[2]. | | [1]: https://play.battlesnake.com/ | | [2]: https://changelog.com/gotime/182 | judohacker wrote: | Years ago, I played around with Robocode and genetic | programming to "evolve" battle strategies. I was always | surprised by how simple the generated winning strategies were. | They were always counter intuitive. | SavantIdiot wrote: | RobotWar lives![1] Yay! | | 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. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar | | [2] http://corewars.org/ | someguyorother wrote: | > Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I | learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been | identified. | | 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? | SavantIdiot wrote: | > The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper | stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. | | 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. | kylebolt wrote: | Very cool, well done. | mavhc wrote: | I assumed it was a real robot with onboard processing and was | going to make a joke about it using FaaS | judohacker wrote: | When my daughter was in grade 5, I volunteered to teach | programming for an afternoon while the teacher could do one-on- | ones. | | 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! ;) | | [1] https://robocode.sourceforge.io/ | jimmaswell wrote: | Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very | basic python in high school once when someone formed a | "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was | capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more | receptive but this experience solidified to me that | understanding programming is something that some small subset | of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to | the others, same as my compsci professor and some studies said, | and my experiences working tutoring suggested. | KMnO4 wrote: | I can confirm. I went to a gifted school and Lego Mindstorms | was on the curriculum. | | 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". | schemescape wrote: | In case anyone on here is interested, I made a simple, in-browser | JavaScript robot battle programming game like this (human vs. CPU | only) that embeds VS Code's editor: | https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/cyber-coliseum | | Don't expect too much -- I just made this for fun :) | gadders wrote: | Anyone remember Java Tanks? | Jamieee wrote: | Robocode? https://github.com/robo-code/robocode ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-07-21 23:01 UTC)