how about Wesnoth AI contest?

[lipk]

Also, I want to point out an email from the dev list in February, apparently there was some kind of wesnoth ai tournament on the internet at some point (?), so you might want to see how they ran it.

That was only a solemn speculative mail to the list by an individual we've (or at least I've) never heard of before or after.

[iceiceice]

Sorry, perhaps I should have given the link to his third post in that thread instead:

There was a competition somewhere on the Internet. I think in
November.(I don't find the link, sorry) Where students competed against
each other by programming an AI. These AIs would then play against each
other. That is pretty much what I suggest here.

[lipk]

That doesn't sound like it refers to a Wesnoth AI contest specifically (not even in the context of the email).

[iceiceice]

That doesn't sound like it refers to a Wesnoth AI contest specifically (not even in the context of the email).

I'm not sure why you say so, with respect I disagree. But of course I could be wrong, and obviously he isn't specific.

[lipk]

It would be rather odd that mention an event so relevant to the discussion only in the third mail, as a side note, without any specifics. It would be very surprising as well if someone organized such a competition and we didn't hear of it.

Anyways, we have the guy's address, so if it's important info, we can ask for clarification.

[iceiceice]

No, the emails I linked to were responses in a thread about suggestions for GSoC projects. An event as described is totally irrelevant to the main discussion.

I don't see why it would be "very surprising" if we were not notified when wesnoth were used for an ai contest intended only for students. You're right, the organizer might reasonably tell us about it, but if he did not need our help or advice he might just as easily not do so. I participated once in a very small ai contest ran by a high school teacher for a very simple game, I'm not sure but I doubt if he notified the creators.

Besides this, if it's just any old student AI contest, it doesn't really make sense why Lars would mention it at all (we all know what a student AI contest is?) or that he wouldn't be able to find a link? (you can find links to hundreds of student ai contests of all kinds just by googling...)

Like I said, this is second hand and I obviously don't know for a fact if it was wesnoth related or not, I just thought I would mention it as a possibility...

[lipk]

I'm still not convinced, but this discussion doesn't get us closer to anything besides my 600th post. So, if you don't mind, I'll just keep my doubts for myself.

[Turuk]

I'm still not convinced, but this discussion doesn't get us closer to anything besides my 600th post. So, if you don't mind, I'll just keep my doubts for myself.

And hopefully silly_sad will be returning to this thread to comment on responses and expand a bit more on his idea move this along.

[optimother]

Interesting idea. How it may be implemented:

0) All competing AIs are done in LUA. It's easy, portable and can be later used in game
1) We need a GUI-less wesnoth server which hosts the game itself (and handles time limits)
2) AI's connect as multiplayer clients (GUI-less client)
3) AI developers create their bots locally by running against built-in AI's first
4) Once developed bot ready, it is compiled with LuaJIT (to prevent easy reading. LuaJIT because it produces cross-platform bytecode, unlike luac) and published to contest
5) Developers can download other's bots and run their creations against them. Since you don't see the source of the bot you are about to run it is done in virtual machine. By using tools like vagrant it's very easy to automate it and takes just several of minutes
6) Once a month all published AI's are played against each other to update their scores by contest organizer, also in virtual environment
7) 10% of worst performers are wiped out (but can be resubmitted of course) to make contest running faster

Quite a lot of work actually