Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Code. Play. Learn. Win. BATTLECODE.”.
Jerry MAO All right, thanks to everybody for coming out tonight. Tonight, we’ll be launching Battlecode 2023 Tempest.. Let’S get started. [ MUSIC PLAYING, ], Lightning booms in the distance and mountains crack as they shift about. Rampant anomalies, destroy the very fabric of reality, spurred by the misuse of mutation and alchemy.
SERENA LI. In a last, ditch effort to save humanity, alchemists have torn open, unstable portals to a new universe, but you are not alone. Escapees from another. Reality have fled to this world as well and seek to take it for themselves.. The battle of realities has begun and only one will survive. JERRY MAO Battlecode is MIT’S largest student run AI programming competition.. It actually started all the way back. In 2001.
SERENA LI, Our competitors write software programs called bots that we play against each other in a strategy. Game., JERRY MAO And it’s about coming up with the best strategy you can in just one month’s time., ANDY WANG. So what we do is we hold lectures for the first two weeks. JERRY MAO. These lectures cover all of the fundamentals of how to write. Perhaps your first ever AI bot and really introduce our beginner computer scientists to the world of AI and how to really get started. SPEAKER 1. So it looks like there is some kind of issue. Here., Let’s see if we can figure out what it was. SPEAKER. 2. Does anyone have any ideas of what we should do if we don’t find any robots, SERENA LI In this year’s game, the goal was to capture more space on the map than the enemy team..
Andy WANG Contestants will write code to attack in certain ways defend. In other situations – and they make small improvements., So they improve their pathfinding., They improve their attacks., They improve their resource. Gathering. JERRY MAO, A big part of Battlecode, is writing down your strategy, trying something that you think might work.
And then really just watching. It play a lot of games. SPEAKER 3, All right, so without any further ado. Let’S start with our very first round: Super Cow Powers versus Baby, Ducks. And they’ll be meeting on TACOCAT. SERENA LI. So today is the sprint 1 tournament, which is where competitors submit their first bots to kind of test out the waters and see what the typical strategies are, and also just how well their bot fares against other people.
SPEAKER 3. Already entering a bit of a fight. In the middle., A huge economy, here. Look at that swarm of robots as a result.
SPEAKER, 4, We’ll see if this ends up being successful. SERENA LI, I think, for participants. Battlecode is a really good way to practice, working in a team and kind of develop. A polished piece of software. JERRY MAO One month is a very short time frame for making something so impressive. Note some contestants end up with 10,000 lines of code, largely from scratch..
We have a very active server where people are always talking to each other. Asking questions about strategy debugging., And I think this really leads to a very close community and a very close bond. SERENA LI For the final tournament.
We actually fly in all of our finalists from around the world and also around the US so that they can meet the other competitors that they’ve been talking with.. They get to see their bots play out on a big screen and it went really well. [ MUSIC PLAYING ] JERRY MAO. I still remember when I was back in high school, I used to actually be a competitor in Battlecode from halfway across the world., And I remember becoming a finalist team and flying all the way here and having my first opportunity to get to know MIT. To get to know the people who have shared this same interest, the same fascination for AI.. I think it’s something that really connects us. And I think, quite largely thanks to Battlecode that I’ve really found a home here., Give it up for your Battlecode 2023 winners. Producing Perfection .