AI Bot Battles

Have you heard about AI Bot Battles – the artificial intelligence programming competition organized by Grodno’s Yanka Kupala State University’s Computer Safety and System Programming department?

 

During the championship, students tested their skills in developing algorithms by programming a bot to play Snake. In each game they had to contend with other participants’ strategies while trying to reach the apple and eat it faster than the rivals (the system was developed by Timofey Kozliak).

 

First, participants had to program a strategy for their bots while modifying the direction selection function for the snake’s next move. After that, they had several days to improve the strategy.

 

The students who reached the final stage presented non-recurrent solutions:

• Prediction of opponents’ actions several moves in advance;
• Introduction of weights based on multiple game world parameters into the algorithm;
• Use of the base algorithm to find the shortest path and walk (or slither, as it were) to the goal with confidence;
• Some solutions were so inventive that they broke the rules and logic of the game world …

 

There were even some experiments with training neural networks, but those didn’t reach the finals.

 

Natasha: “I’m amazed by how inventive the finalists were at algorithm development, considering that among the finalists were recent graduates and even first-year students.”

 

Artem: “They did an excellent job! When I was a third-year student, I couldn’t do that) We welcome their talents at Exposit, it’ll be great to work on ML projects together!”