Welcome to mini ai cups

For the past five years, we have been holding the Russian ai cup, the largest annual championship in artificial intelligence in the CIS (and if it is simpler, writing bots for games). And now, for seven years, the participants of this championship have asked either to leave the sandbox to work all year, or to launch a platform where they could play all year in similar contests, only slightly smaller in size.

We thought and decided to try the second option - we opened a new platform with mini-competitions related to artificial intelligence and writing bots for games. Meet a new championship class for us - http://aicups.ru/ .

And immediately we offer to take part in the first test championship.
And do not beat us, please, for the design of the site. We were very upset about the quality of the competition itself, so we just did not have time to design. Pretend that we are seeing;)

The essence of the task

Since this is the first championship on the new site, we didn’t pay much attention to the complexity of the task and took a fairly simple theme - transporting passengers to the floors using an elevator. In order to diversify the task, several factors are added to it that affect the algorithm of passenger transportation:

1. Every passenger has weight
2. The more passengers we carry, the slower we go
3. When reaching a certain (critical) number of passengers, we drive even slower.

In addition, the task is multiplayer. That is, we have two groups of elevators and each player controls his group. The passengers themselves are divided into "their" and "alien" - it is more difficult for an alien to be taken from the floor. But if I could, I got 2x points;)

Read more about all this in the “Rules” section below.

Championship stages

The championship opens today, September 15, and runs until October 9th.

So far, our plan is:

On the 15th of September a playground with a sandbox opens, and participants have the opportunity to upload their strategies and play non-rated games “for fun” with their other strategies, with other players or with baseline - two fake users live in the sandbox (“good baseline” - always takes away only its passengers and “evil baseline” - takes away only aliens).

No more than 24 new solutions can be downloaded per day, and no more than 48 non-rated games can be played.

On September 18, rating games begin to work in the sandbox (the system creates it itself). From time to time, two participants are pseudo-randomly selected (for the selection we use TrueSkill, thanks to Microsoft for this excellent algorithm!). From each of them we take the strategy that he previously chose to participate in the rating. These two strategies play with each other, the winner moves up in the leaderboard, loses down. Thus, a sandbox rating is built.

On October 9th we are planning to hold the final. A number of top participants from the sandbox will be selected into a separate rating, after which we will launch several waves of “every with each” games and thus find out whose strategy is the coolest, distribute prizes, take into account suggestions and go on preparing for the next such championship!

Prizes

As it has long been taken in our championships, we award TOP6. The balance of prizes is the same as in the recent highloadcup:

1. Apple iPad Air 2 Cellular 16GB for first place
2. WD MyCloud 6TB
3. WD MyCloud 6TB
4. WD MyPassport Ultra 2TB
5. WD MyPassport Ultra 2TB
6. WD MyPassport Ultra 2TB

In addition, T-shirts! We will not violate this good tradition - TOP20 will receive from us T-shirts with the symbols of the championship. Maybe there will be more T-shirts - in the highloadcup we also started with 20 pieces, as a result we give 116 :)

Task and Rules

So, more about the task.

Building Description:

1. The building contains 2 groups of elevators, each group belongs to one player.
2. The building contains 2 stairs
3. The building has 9 floors, which are numbered from 1 to 9 upwards
4. The height of each floor is 1
5. The distance from the center of the floor to the elevator group is 60 units.
6. The distance from the center of the floor to the waiting area for passengers in each group is 20 units.

Lifts:

1. Each of the two groups contains 4 lifts.
2. Elevators in the group are 80 units apart
3. At the beginning of the game, all elevators are on the 1st floor with open doors and ready for the passengers
4. After opening the doors, the elevator stands on the floor for at least 40 ticks.
5. Opening doors lasts 100 ticks
6. Door closure lasts 100 ticks
7. Maximum capacity of the elevator is 20 passengers
8. Empty elevator overcomes floor for 50 ticks
9. The elevator travels the slower, the more passengers it carries
10. If there are more than 4 passengers in the elevator, it loses speed in double volume
11. The loss of elevator speed depends on the weight of the passenger.

Passengers:

1. Passengers appear in pairs every 20 ticks on the first floor up to 2000 ticks
2. During the game, each passenger wants to visit from 1 to 5 random unique floors, except the first one (the distribution of the number of floors and the floors themselves are uniform) and return to the first floor near the end of the game
3. Passengers waiting for the elevator 500 ticks, then go to the stairs
4. Passenger climb speed - one floor per 200 ticks
5. The speed of the descent passenger on the stairs - one floor in 100 ticks
6. Horizontal passenger speed 2 units per tick
7. The passenger has a random weight from 1 to 1.1
8. After exiting the elevator, the passenger goes to his floor exactly 40 ticks.
9. The passenger spends 500 ticks on the floor, after which he appears on the floor from the side where he left.
10. The passenger always goes to the nearest elevator
11. Passenger cannot be reassigned
12. If the passenger elevator left without him, then the passenger is assigned the elevator assigned to him and he returns to his starting position.
13. You can pick up an enemy passenger only with an elevator, which has already stood on the floor of 40 ticks.
14. Lift lift hall -> stairs, floor -> lift hall occur instantly

Scoring:

1. For his passenger the player gets (number of floors) * 10 points
2. A player receives twice as much as an enemy passenger than his

The winner is the player with the most points.

API and Baseline we posted in the official repository with the documentation, here . In the same repository accepted new issue, we will definitely view them.

And what to write?

We now have an API for the following languages:

1. Python 2.7
2. Python 3.6
3. Cpp11
4. Java1.8
5. Nodejs
6. PHP7

Perhaps this list will be updated. Right now we are trying to connect C #.

And who can participate?

Everyone can participate, without restrictions! Come in, try it! You can participate here , and you can discuss the championship in VK and in Telegram . Good luck in the championship!