tl; dr: Contour is the second time organizing offline sites for online programming contest for game bots on CodinGame. Sites will be in 7 cities: Yekaterinburg, Izhevsk, Innopolis, Novosibirsk, Perm, Rostov-on-Don and St. Petersburg.
Everything will be held on June 16, on Saturday (in Innopolis - June 18, on Monday). Come if you want to get away from work tasks and program something unusual. Registration link - at the end of the post.
Hello! I love to participate in programming competitions. For example, I am engaged in sports programming - recently in the team of Ural FU: Kek became the bronze medalist of ACM ICPC World Finals .
My other cool hobby is programming CodinGame game bots. I have been doing this not so long ago, but I managed to get involved and now I am looking for like-minded people. So I decided to help with the organization of the hubs and invite everyone to join.
My CodinGame profile .
What is CodinGame
CodinGame is a platform for learning game programming. Once in a couple of months, a 10-day programming bots programming competition starts. Usually everything is well organized:
- Many participants. You can compete with very strong opponents from around the world. For example, in the last competition there were 2120 participants, 106 of them from Russia.
- Moderate entry threshold. Even a novice can make a bot that will play and defeat other bots. You can use any of the 26 programming languages .
- Convenient and beautiful. There are convenient leaderboards by countries, visualizers for watching bots, sandbox for running code in the browser.
The visualizer of one of the competitions.
On the night of June 16, a new competition begins - the Code of Kutulu . The rules will be published after the start, while only the name is known, referring to the work of Howard Lovecraft. However, it is clear what to expect. Most likely, it will be necessary to manage one or more bots in the world that operates according to the specified rules. Cars, airplanes, ships, wizards ride, fly, float, shoot, throw balls to collect bonuses, take checkpoints, destroy opponents and score goals. It is necessary to read the current state of the world in time with the team and respond with a command for each of its bot.
Why write bots and compete
In general, I am used to other tasks and competitions. Before the first contest on CodinGame, I thought that game bots were something complicated. It is approximately like modern chess engines, which are able to calculate the game 25 moves ahead and defeat the existing grandmasters.
However, it turned out that there is no need to write complex algorithms. Rather, you need to come up with ideas for heuristics, rooting for your bot at matches and trying to wean him off from doing ridiculously stupid moves. Unlike sports programming, it is useful to write tests here - they help in the long run.
The guys from CodinGame have learned how to make games that do not frighten newbies with their complexity, and at the same time are quite variable - experts can compete with each other in mental flexibility and the ability to program complex logic.
In all new games there is a beautiful visualization, thanks to which the games are understandable even to a child. And the community is ready to help with the interface, tools, and mistakes in strategy, spicing up any discussion of good humor.
What are hubs and where will they be
CodinGame offers players to gather offline to meet, discuss strategies and, if desired, write code in pairs and compete with each other. Platforms for this are hubs (coding hubs).
Trello-board for hub organizers.
It is already known that there will be 13 hubs in Germany, Colombia, Lithuania, Turkey and France. 7 more hubs will be in Russia in cities with offices of the contour.
Here is what happens on the hub:
- going, sorting out the rules and discussing the strategy
- write code 2 hours (optional - in pairs)
- going for a checkpoint: discussing success, eating pizza, deanonymizing participants from the top leaderboard
- write code again 2 hours
- going to checkpoint again
Hubs will last 4-5 hours. It is clear that you can leave earlier or stick to another hour or two.
Register with links and come with your laptop:
- Hub in Yekaterinburg - June 16, Saturday, beginning at 12:00 (MSK + 2)
- Hub in Izhevsk - June 16, Saturday, beginning at 11:00 (MSK + 1)
- Hub in Novosibirsk - June 16, Saturday, beginning at 14:00 (MSK + 4)
- Hub in Perm - June 16, Saturday, beginning at 12:00 (MSK + 2)
- Hub in Rostov-on-Don - June 16, Saturday, beginning at 10:00 (MSK)
- Hub in St. Petersburg - June 16, Saturday, beginning at 10:00 (MSK)
- Hub in Innopolis - June 18, Monday, beginning at 18:00 (MSK)
See you!