[HN Gopher] I built my first serverless robot and won $1000
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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
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