Jozi.JS 2018, 10 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: Introducing the Entelect Challenge 2018 - Edwin Fullard and Pierre Roux

Description

This year's Entelect Challenge has been launched! The challenge is a yearly competition for professionals, students, and enthusiasts where the goal is to develop an intelligent bot to win the game, and ultimately part of R200 000 in cash. This lightning talk will introduce this year's game theme, the game dynamics and rules, the tournament format, and demonstrate how to get started with coding an intelligent bot in JavaScript from the starter pack. We will also run through the design of the platform that supports the challenge, however it's currently in development, so more a more detailed view will be available in the near future. Some members of the challenge team will also be available to chat at this event.

This talk was recorded at the Jozi.JS meetup group on the 24 May 2018.

https://www.meetup.com/Jozi-JS/events/249460222/

Disclaimer: The opinions in this talk are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of this channel, the meetup group, or it’s sponsors.

A

All right guys, I hear this is Adrienne I'm. Even this is here I'm. Just gonna start you off with a quick video.

A

Okay, so for the guys that know about the intellect challenge and the intellect challenges are a coding competition as soon as we know the biggest in South Africa we're giving away two hundred thousand grand in prizes, you can win the nice share of that, it's usually based on a retro or a classic game. So each year we pick a different thing with different rules.

A

Each of the game is different, so some new challenge, if you want to keep on partaking through the years we calling on all professionals, enthusiasts students, anyone that wants support, taking this challenge and they can just come and enjoy some fun coding for once. If you don't want to work on that banking system again, you know, so we basically challenge people to come and code intelligent, but to play a game, so you don't have to use AI.

A

Although this is a nice place where you can test out your skills, if you want to learn something new, you can just use this logical problem solving or just your normal development skills. I'm actually part I can both your first box, the history of the challenge, we've been running. It now for seven years we slowed it out with Tron, then we did Battle City pac-man, spice invaders, Bomberman and then last year we did battleships fun.

A

Fact year in 2016, we actually doubled the prize money from 100,000 grand that we gave to the 1a to 200,000 ran that we spread amongst the finalists so this year we're also introducing a new challenge that will run with the main challenge all on the side. It's the University Cup. So this is basically just to give students a chance to actually also partake in the challenge, but they usually busy throughout the year.

A

So this is a one-day Agathon that will be out at the participating universities and it's almost something like google ash got it so we'll release a problem statement and they have six hours to solve this, and then the winners will actually get a gaming laptop each and then take us to Comic Con to watch the main challenge finals and then we'll also sponsor some cool gadgets for the university's lab.

A

So, like you saw on the video this year, we're doing tower defense. We themed the game around great alert, the classic command, & Conquer game, and we use the mechanics from plants vs. zombies, but because you're, not playing as a player versus the computer, is player vs. player, it's more like plants vs. plants.

A

You basically just have to place buildings on the map to defend your base and trying to destroy the enemy's base. The basic skills really I'm actually challenging this year is economy management and overall gameplay strategy.

A

So last year we tried this format, fool and the challenge, and we decided it works really. Well, so we're gonna do the phased approach to game, and this means there's going to be four different tournaments. That's going to be running, the first three will be round robins and then the third one will lead into the finals, which is the double elimination. You can submit your bot anytime between the first three tournaments. So the final deadline is with the tournament online September or actually think it's midnight on 8 September.

A

But then the tournament will be run on the 9th and each of the first two tournaments. If you come in first place after the round-robin was run, you get a ticket straight to Comicon at the finals and then second and third place has a nice cash prize, I just to say sorry for not getting the golden ticket.

A

So, like I, said multiple times, comic-con is the venue for the finals we're actually going to be on the main stage at 11 a.m. so that's pretty cool very excited to be there. It's the first comic-con in Africa. Actually, so it's gonna be awesome. The first-place prize is actually 70,000 rands. So that's that's. Quite a lot of money.

A

The other cool thing is, if you come any place from second to eighth place, you still get quite a sum of money, so that's that's more incentive to actually portside okay.

B

So the basic to rule some leaders we have each player will start with 20 health and hundred percent percent health and 20 energy and the player can spend energy to place. Bowlings is going to use these buildings to defend an attack and attained over well mr. Burnett the different kinds buildings are attack, defend and energy generators, so the one is economy, the other one is defensive, the other one offensive each then player can do one of the following. They can either do enough income, and that means skip this round.

B

I don't want to spend energy or do anything. The second is place, an energy building or place the attack building or the fence building. We are doing this game in a face. Faced approach, so we'll be adding more extra nice juicy curries later on. So these rules here, ok, so now we're going to give you a quick example of what the game would look like so I'm going to be on the right side. Even here is going to be on the blue side. So, first of all,.

B

Ok, so seeing their attack building I'm going to place at the fence bowling day to try and cover my rope just.

A

Because I want to attack more later, I'm gonna play some energy for things to supplement my income.

B

I'm, seeing an open road I want to take this opportunity to try an attack where he isn't defending it. I.

A

Still don't have enough energy, maybe more energy.

B

Ok, so seeing this economy strategy I want to get in on it. Small I'm gonna need extra energy. If I want to compete with me.

A

Okay, so I was trying to defend against. That missile looks, like my part, is off by one error.

A

B

So I actually see these errors or the missiles and they will keep moving. They will progress each round there. You can see the top missile hit my defense building, so that's gonna inflict damage on my building and because this is simple, simplified its going to kill my defense building so that I was going to be open now, but afterwards my missile hit his home base because he didn't defend I, throw again over simplified he's just got one shot than he does in the real game.

B

It takes multiple shots, so you'll have to keep defending your home base on the sides, as well as figured out your economy versus your offensive strategy. How are you gonna overwhelm your opponent, so this year we officially support the four languages: Java C, sharp and JavaScript.

B

Now we also the community, helped us a lot in adding these supplementary languages. They do this by submitting starter boats in that specific language. So if you can piece together a starter pot in a new language, that's not on this list, yet we can accept it for a pull request and put it in a tournament. The deadline for this is the 27th of my midnight. So if you want to add a new language, that's not on this list get it in before they the languages. We do have C++ rust, cotton, PHP, Pascal and Golan.

B

So for those fields wondering about the architecture of everything behind this game engine we have on the front. In four, we have angular 5 running for front-end client facing portal that connects up to the tournament API, that's in Java and spring. This is used together with a data storage. Storing your pod falls on blob storage, which the bot, runner and tournament manager will use to play. These bot matches again they're all built in Java, and we use docker containers do run bots in different environments for each language requirements.

B

Okay, now, I'm gonna show you guys a quick demo so how to code your own JavaScript bot so remember, I, said we have starter BOTS. So if you go to the intellect challenge website the one I used for the video, so this gets toasted button. It's going to take you here, give you a first step and from here you'll download to start it back. So what is the starter pack? It's basically, this. It contains everything you need to start your first bot and play it against the basic other slaughter BOTS.

B

So here's the list of starter BOTS does all the languages. If you look at the JavaScript bot, we can say cool, there's only two files of interest here, it's a start about two J's and a bottle Jason. So, first of all, before carrying on, we want to build our own bot. So, let's copy out this thought about paste it here and give it a name.

B

So inside the spot bottle Jason we can change our nickname. The spotter Jason is used so that we know who you are, how to contact you. What language about is running in and where it's located some languages like Java, would use the target folder and you have to specify where your jar package actually is. Each language has its own quirks. Okay, so let's call this Jersey J's only. Can we save this? We don't need to change anything more there. Now this conflict, Jason is gonna.

B

Tell our game runner who's playing against who so we're going to be playing ourselves. This folder Jersey against one of the start, the board's the Python bot good, that's fine! If we double click, this run bet it's going to use this jar to run a match between our two BOTS. So, firstly, we want to change our but I'm. Gonna use IntelliJ for this, so JetBrains is generous enough to sponsor licenses.

B

Do everyone do anyone participating will have a chance to win these licenses if they participate in the first two adjournments, so IntelliJ the community edition of IntelliJ is feeder. Okay, so let's open up the spot.

B

Foolish, okay, okay, so here's the folder before but most of you know we can use something entirely different to JavaScript. You don't need to go full-on with a big IDE. Okay. So let me put this in presentation mode here guys. Everyone will have a better view. Okay, so here's the JavaScript, but we know this is JavaScript because we use stick. We don't know why we is it, but we use it as all jokes aside, we start off by initializing all global variables, we'll need.

B

If we look further in the script we'll see, we call this function in Nishat, but so from here we are going to initialize most of these global variables. The most important is a state file. The state file contains the game world map, meaning all the buildings, the missiles in play, player, information, health and such you'll get this information from this file. So this is gonna, be one JSON object from there. We look through all the players to find the player. Who is player a that's me. My opponent is always player B.

B

So if we continue on on it, we're gonna find we initialize some more entities and then we run strategy. This is the fun part. This is where you get to add your own logic, your own flavor, to how the gap should progress so in run strategy. Quite simple bunch of each statements, so first we check is there anything under attack if, if it is under attack, well define that row? If that's not true, that means we have a chance to look around and do something else.

B

So it's a start about it's basically, the most simple thing we can think of that works. It works as a blank blueprint for you guys to build your BOTS upon. So if we have enough energy for the most expensive building, both a random building, this function will figure out a random building open space and just build something. So we don'twe started. If none of that happened, they probably don't have enough energy. Just do nothing then.

B

So what we're going to want to do is add some offensive capability, so we can do this in as if statement, if there was nothing under attack, we don't have to defend. Let's attack ourselves, let's do what I did in the slide. So we're gonna. Add this an if statement that checks for open rows is there any open under finger throws well, let's create the function to find that this function is called as is, and it is gonna return nothing at this moment. So, let's give it some logic inside through this logic.

B

First thing we need is to find all my opponents defenders to get that we go through the list of all the buildings. We falter them that are of player, be my opponent and are of building type defense. That's the balance, we're looking for cool we're going to get that list now, after that, we're going to find the rows which are open, which do not have opponent offenders on them to get this.

B

We use this function to give yourself a small array kind of like this, so it's going to give us a list of all the round numbers on the map for each of those numbers we are going to check. Does that throw? Does it not contain any opponent of English? That means it's empty? It's. We can attack that throughout there's, nothing stopping us from attacking day good. So this is going to give us those open rows exactly what we need. So we use this in this. If statement here.

B

And let's use that for the attack function so, let's add the attack function.

B

Very basic new function: we all know this. So what does the attack function needs? It needs to know which rows are open. We really have a function for that. To get open rows function will give us a row off. It will give us an array, a list of rows that are open now, if we use that we want to figure out which cell is empty in that row. So first things to note is that we can only build on our side of the map. We cannot build in an enemy's side of the map.

B

That's inside, so we need to find cells which do not have any buildings on them. We cannot build two buildings on one cell, so the cell is empty. Also, it's on our side of the map less than X, and it is on this row number we're looking for this open row that we're trying to attack cool now. One thing we do need to keep in mind what, if all the cells are fold, what, if all the cells have a building on them, is no more space to bolt.

B

So we might need a check for that here. We just check all those empty cells 0. Well, let the bolt random function figure something out, there's nothing! We can do on this row at that point if the code that continued for stat, if statements this means we're in luck, there's an open road with open cells where you can build a building.

B

So, firstly, we're going to set the x coordinate. We know all those cells are empty, let's say the first cell, the second cell and the fourth cell in this row or empty pick, a random one from this get its x-coordinate set that x or y coordinate would be the row number we selected previously and the building type is 1. Here you have 3 options: 0 for a defense, building, 1/4, intact, building and 2 for an energy building. That's difference between attack defense and economy.

B

Ok, so we have these set up now, we're gonna send them free to the bolt command now in the bolt command. It's just gonna write to the command text file and it's gonna use this information to write our command. It's a simple! Come on. It's like a 0, comma, 1, comma 1. This means X, 0, Y, 1 and bully type 1, and the game engine is going to use that the bolt okay, so our bot should be fine but I've, just English sensation.

B

Here, I'm wondering this: it's gonna get an open road cool and then all the building day. What if we don't have enough energy to actually both day, then we're going to try and build something we don't have enough money for that might be very used by another function. So, let's fix that with a small check check if myself my player check, if my energy is more than this attack building surprise- and that's it- we added our first bit of logic to the spot now to run the spot go back here.

B

So this is the game in on it. We're gonna run this using a bad fall and it will sort the match. This is the two boats playing against each other. We are playing a if you look at the health you might see in between the flickering sorry for that that we are starting to waste the enemy, so it only took a few rounds and we actually won based on the score. He had a few bullets in between that we probably destroyed up here.

B

So this is how you do your first pot and how you get a chance at winning the prize money.

A

B

So it has a cool down and it will keep shooting afterwards. We're gonna have questions right now.

A

Precious, so if you want to enter you just go to the website, you'll find the player portal link there. If you register there, you upload your path there and you are entered for the competition. The website also has all the information you'll need ever for the challenge, not for anything.

B

A

You have any questions. The community is quite active on forum, not internet, and we also take all the questions. If we can't give answers all the code and everything, including the smaller pack, is on the top under infinite challenge. And then, if you want to get mobile to the team directly and you can email challenge and inflect Asiata right.