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Comment by vyrotek | Hacker News Reader

I still think a webservice-based version of these contests would be much more fun. The idea would be to only give the simulator a URL of where your AI is hosted. There would be an expected set of endpoints for the simulator to call and would invoke your service when it was your turn. Perhaps the AI could call services on the simulator as well.

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.

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Stdin/out is used to transfer information from/to the simulator, so any language is possible. The list of languages they support is here: http://aichallenge.org/starter_packages.php

You can also ask the contest organizers to add a compiler/interpreter if anything is missing.

Ah, thanks. I was glad to see a C# package there ;)

"I still think a webservice-based version of these contests would be much more fun."

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.

While this is true, it would also mean that more games could be run concurrently as the total computing horsepower would be larger than what the contest can afford to fund. :)

Doing this has some really cool advantage, but also some significant disadvantages. Namely, it gives a large advantage to those with access to powerful computers. Ideally, the contest would be one of "Who can create the best bot?", as opposed to one of "Who can afford/borrow the most computing horsepower?"

But feedback is always welcome.

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