It's time to get away from work tasks and program something unusual.
On March 3, Saturday, from 12:00 to 16:00, we will write bots together for the game.

What happened?

On the night of March 3, a 10-day bots competition for multiplayer games starts on the CodinGame.com platform. What kind of game - until the secret, we learn after the start of the competition. So far only the name - Botters of the galaxy - and the design theme are known:

Looks like Star Lord is using Linux.

What is CodinGame?

CodinGame is a platform for learning game programming. The 10-day bot programming contest is one of the formats. They have held more than a dozen such competitions and they know a lot about them. In particular, they take care that the entrance barrier is low - even a beginner can make a tolerably working bot.

On the other hand, each competition gathers several thousand participants and gives the opportunity to indulge in forces with extremely strong rivals. The battle in the top is usually not for life, but for death. In other words, everything should be interesting.

In the recent Mean Max competition there were 1033 participants from around the world and 58 from Russia .

So what kind of game?

One can only speculate, looking at past competitions . Most often you have to manage one or more agents in the world, working according to specified rules.

Cars, race cars, ships, wizards drive, fly, swim, shoot, throw balls to collect bonuses, take checkpoints, destroy opponents and score goals. And the bot needs to read the current state of the world in time, and respond with a command for each of its agents.

Freeze frame visualizer of Mean Max.

However, no one wants to repeat, and the authors of the competition are trying their best to come up with something essentially new each time. So this time in the announcement write : However, I can tell you about it . So we are waiting for a surprise!

And why is this me?

Frankly, the ability to write bots for games very few people need with a practical purpose. But there are other reasons to do this.

Programming bots develops. We have to come up with ideas, test them in practice and learn to bring them to a working state. You train to plunge into a new data domain and analyze it. As a rule, fast bots without bugs win. Therefore, it is necessary to develop skills for testing, debugging, profiling and code optimization.

The first version of the bot will be based on simple heuristics. Such a bot will defeat simple rivals, but high results cannot be achieved without genetic algorithms, brute force cuts and the like. The competition gives a reason to read about them, to understand and apply.

However, the main thing is to program bots with fun and drive :)

Okay, so what else about Coding Hub?

CodinGame invites everyone to create offline platforms where local coding cameras could meet, meet, discuss a competition, share ideas and start programming bots. Such events are called CodingHubs.

This is what the Trello board for coordinating hubs looks like:

There are hubs in Antwerp, Kaunas, Chisinau, Lyon, Medellin, Paris and Chorzów.

We decided to make a hub in Yekaterinburg. Let's start the day after the night start of the competition. The venue will be a conference room in the office development circuit in Yekaterinburg.

Photo from the previous hackathon on the same platform.

All you need is to register and arrive on March 3, on Saturday, by 12:00, on the site with your laptop.

In the program: pizza, discussion of rules and strategies, as well as viewing the fights of our bots on the big screen. Must be fun :)

And to make it even more fun, we will prepare starter kits for the meeting - ready-made repositories with boring and routine code: a project with dependencies, object model classes, input-output. All in order to make it as easy as possible to write your first bot. Overnight, we plan to make starting repositories for two of our most popular programming languages ​​in our company - C # and JavaScript. However, if you like another language - we will be glad to you too. Just you will be a little harder.

In general, if you have never participated in something like this - this is the right moment to try. And there and to the ICFP Contest is not far away. If you participated - a good way to find like-minded people in Yekaterinburg.

Register at CodingHub in Yekaterinburg