HACKER Q&A
📣 haolez

Can someone recommend a game for a programming competition?


I'm going to make a competition for my company's developers so that we can explore other problem domains with programming. I'm thinking about something simple, where one can make a playable AI without too much effort. Can anyone recommend such game? Can you also recommend a server software to host this competition?

  👤 jewel Accepted Answer ✓
Any two player game will work, tic-tac-toe, fences, checkers, tetris. I particularly enjoyed a programming competition that involved a real time tank battle, like "combat" on the atari.

Any game that's grid based with a fixed number of states works well, either turn-based or real time.

You can do a double elimination bracket like a sports tournament, and can be done on a spreadsheet or whiteboard.

For more than two players at once, you could try snake, hearts, or poker.

👤 gradschool
Othello is a good game for that. It has a small following of players around the world. It's just complicated enough to be strategically interesting but simple enough for a decent programmer to implement something that outperforms a human player.
👤 davidhbolton
Back when I did my GCSE (mid schools exams) in 1977, I programmed a very simple tennis game that I read about in a UK games magazine sometime in 1974.

A 2 player game, the court is divided into 12 spaces (6 either side of the net). The serving player rolls two dice and moves the ball that many spaces. So 12 is out, anything below 6 hits the net.

Following a successful serve the opposing player gets to choose whether to roll one or two dice. Other than that its normal tennis rules. It's mostly luck with the main skill deciding whether to roll one or two dice.

Or how about Rock, Scissors and Paper?

👤 orange_tee
The AI challenges from a decade ago where pretty fun and practically exactly suited to your needs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Challenge http://ants.aichallenge.org/

Despite the name I don't remember ML featuring prominently in the solutions.

👤 cbanek
Stratego is a fun game and easy to program but allows for a lot of different strategies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratego

👤 mleonard
https://halite.io/
👤 bmitch2112
Check out https://play.battlesnake.com/

Can quickly spin up a Snake using an AWS lambda. It can be a lot of fun.

👤 rithmAlgo
I'm also interested in this, or any kind of data analysis or 'AI' challenge that isn't kaggle, kind of like competitive programming but for AI
👤 t-writescode
Is RoboCode still around? That’s the game I played in class about 17 years ago that would fit the Bill.
👤 QuadmasterXLII
Codingame runs top notch game ai competitions, they might have a plug and play solution for you
👤 ketanmaheshwari
sudoku and 2048 comes to mind.
👤 young_unixer
Pac-Man?