any news on next contest?

[stevesnemesis]

Hello, I am fairly new here. I found this website at the tail end of ants just in time to make a few submissions before the contest ended. Since its ended it seems this place has gone dark, is there any news on future contests? Anything like an estimated date on when the next contest will begin or will there even be a next contest?

Does anyone have any links to other sites with AI competitions like this? Experimenting with AI in my free time is my main hobby and I've had a lot of free time lately. In case anyone is interested I have found Kaggle.com, however their competitions are for real world applications not games.

[UncleVasya]

Hi and welcome. And excuse me for late answer.

This is usual state for this forum to be dead several months after the end of a contest. Like trees and flowers after cold winter, it will awake and return to life. I assume it will happen in late May or early June.

Currently there is no any work in progress (as I know), even game isn't picked yet. And that's okay too. Traditionally there are 5-6 months between contest end and start of the development of a new one.

Also it's useful for you to know that there was an open beta stage for Ants (long enough: June - October) and participating in it didn't affected one's ability to participate in further stages. So take a look to not miss beta stage of the next challenge if it will have one. Best way is not only to read forum but also to be present in contest irc-channel: (in this months channel has more activity than forum).

As about contests like this. I have few links that look nice but a) I've never competing them and b) they are a lot less popular. Here are they:




But I advice you to gather strength for the next aichallenge instead

Feel free to ask more if you have further questions.

[jaman4dbz]

I haven't gotten around to it yet, but you could always try playing with starcraft brood war ai:
http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/

Also, thanks for the link Vasya.

[GreenTea]

[GuiKa]

Is there any way to play ants in a competitive environement atm ?

I really enjoyed the contest but i only played for few weeks in november. Now that i have time i cant play it on fluxid.pl or aichallenge.org as both are down.

I do not search something official, just a ftp with some hundred's people would do.

Thanks.

[UncleVasya]

No, but there is another guy who wants this thing. You can try to contact him on irc, Accoun his nick. But be aware: 1) it is very hard to make him talk; 2) when he'll open his mouth you'll regret you made him talk . Maybe you both will find a way to do what you want, but I think it is a false hope, a chance of success is very low.

[Surya]

This is really mean Vasya
To be honest, I once thought that maybe this Accoun could be a bot made by a frustrated developer. It then clearly appears this guy's real ^^

Anyway, I'm also looking forward to seeing the beginning of the new contest! Even if it's gonna keep me from sleeping as much as I should...

An other idea if you wanna get ready for the next contest would be to develop AI for well know games (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four for example)

[Kettling]

"Does anyone have any links to other sites with AI competitions like this?

There's MIT Battlecode (now an open comp) but their finals were in February, presumably it resets for another round.

CodeChef (mostly Indian, but not exclusively so) has competitions and challenges, but not much AI stuff.

Also, if you want to brush up your ants-AI program there's downloads of all the top bots to run your code against... and you can run ants over SSH if you setup a user with password access disabled and an entry in the authorized_keys file to run your ants bot. People might try to buffer overrun your bot code but presumably you only give access to a short list of people.

[Parasprites]

Is there anything we can do to speedup when the next context will be?

[stevesnemesis]

Thanks for those links everyone, there is definitely enough out there to take up some time. I graduated from MIT in 2008 and I had never heard of BattleCode. Too bad as I would have really enjoyed that, looks like it is an "IAP" activity which means it will only be held over winter holiday. I will set a reminder to check it out next year.

I'm looking forward to the next aichallenge!