6 ms·

I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

145 points by thomasj 5y ago

rabbah 5y ago
I watched the youtube videos of all the battles so far and I was really surprised to see that a very simple strategy (in retrospect) was sufficient to win the competitions. I've been waiting to see if someone implements an AI bot that's trained on all the bots in the competition but maybe you just don't need to.
- msciabarra 5y ago
  Actually the discussion of using an AI trained robot has been frequently discussed on the various forums. Nimbella has even an "python ai" runtime that would support it. However does not seem the winning robots actually uses any A.I.
- tout 5y ago
  That's very much something that happens in Battlesnake[1]! There's a fun Go Time episode about it all[2]. [1]: https://play.battlesnake.com/ https://play.battlesnake.com/ [2]: https://changelog.com/gotime/182 https://changelog.com/gotime/182
- judohacker 5y ago
  Years ago, I played around with Robocode and genetic programming to "evolve" battle strategies. I was always surprised by how simple the generated winning strategies were. They were always counter intuitive.
- ska 5y ago
  In most of these sorts of competition environments, it's a lot less work (and cheaper) to make a competitive hand-tuned algorithm that a really competitive AI version. If you are already working on a similar training environment with a bunch of free/cheap compute jumping in for a weekend or whatever could give decent results, but otherwise you're likely going to get destroyed by bespoke tactics.
mavhc 5y ago
I assumed it was a real robot with onboard processing and was going to make a joke about it using FaaS
gadders 5y ago
Anyone remember Java Tanks?
- Jamieee 5y ago
  Robocode? https://github.com/robo-code/robocode https://github.com/robo-code/robocode
SavantIdiot 5y ago
RobotWar lives![1] Yay! I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/ Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. Never heard of Faas Wars but now I'm excited to see what it is like. These programming-based games are way more fun, IMHO, than hackathons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar [2] http://corewars.org/ http://corewars.org/
- someguyorother 5y ago
  > Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. I wonder if one could make a better ML system than genetic programming for creating CoreWar warriors. Perhaps a neural net connected to a differentiable SAT solver?
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    > The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much./ In fact, it's been about 12 years since I last played around with CoreWars, so I'm not up on the newest theories. It would be interesting to see how a genetic algorithm fares against current ML strategies. I'm completely in the dark as to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero work, I only know classifiers/SSD/autoencoders. Would be fun to learn with this environment tho.
    - someguyorother 5y ago
      > That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much. It's simply the combinatorial explosion: it's easier to find a surprising and good program in ten lines with pointers limited to a max value of 800, than with hundred lines and a pointer max value of 8000.
judohacker 5y ago
When my daughter was in grade 5, I volunteered to teach programming for an afternoon while the teacher could do one-on-ones. I took Robocode[1], made a basic Robot class that the kids could easily extend, and then taught them just enough logic and syntax so they could have their robots battle their classmates'. It was a huge success. We had to close the door to the classroom because the kids were so loud, cheering their robots on. Whenever a kid was called by the teacher to do their one-on-one, they protested "one more minute, I need to improve my robot!" In September, my daughter starts university in software engineering; mission accomplished! ;) [1] https://robocode.sourceforge.io/ https://robocode.sourceforge.io/
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the others, same as my compsci professor and some studies said, and my experiences working tutoring suggested.
  - KMnO4 5y ago
    I can confirm. I went to a gifted school and Lego Mindstorms was on the curriculum. Then in (conventional) high school I hosted a workshop on beginning Python (with Turtle) and half the people couldn’t understand why x=2 after “x=1” and “x+=1”.
    - xsmasher 5y ago
      They need a consistent framework to understand what is happening - "variables are like little boxes where you can put a number or some letters" and "The equal sign lets you change what is in the box." x+=1 just complicates the situation; use x=x+1 to avoid adding more special rules for now. This stuff is teachable, but it doesn't help that the framework is very different than the similar-looking expressions from math class, where "x=1" followed by "x=2" is not allowed.
schemescape 5y ago
In case anyone on here is interested, I made a simple, in-browser JavaScript robot battle programming game like this (human vs. CPU only) that embeds VS Code's editor: https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/cyber-coliseum https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/cyber-coliseum Don't expect too much -- I just made this for fun :)
kylebolt 5y ago
Very cool, well done.
mrcwinn 5y ago
That's so cool! Great job.
bitcharmer 5y ago
What does serverless mean in this context?
lostinspace 5y ago
Personally, I'd ask a little more than 1k for building a killer robot.

145 points by thomasj 5y ago

I watched the youtube videos of all the battles so far and I was really surprised to see that a very simple strategy (in retrospect) was sufficient to win the competitions. I've been waiting to see if someone implements an AI bot that's trained on all the bots in the competition but maybe you just don't need to.

msciabarra 5y ago
Actually the discussion of using an AI trained robot has been frequently discussed on the various forums. Nimbella has even an "python ai" runtime that would support it. However does not seem the winning robots actually uses any A.I.
tout 5y ago
That's very much something that happens in Battlesnake[1]! There's a fun Go Time episode about it all[2]. [1]: https://play.battlesnake.com/ https://play.battlesnake.com/ [2]: https://changelog.com/gotime/182 https://changelog.com/gotime/182
judohacker 5y ago
Years ago, I played around with Robocode and genetic programming to "evolve" battle strategies. I was always surprised by how simple the generated winning strategies were. They were always counter intuitive.
ska 5y ago
In most of these sorts of competition environments, it's a lot less work (and cheaper) to make a competitive hand-tuned algorithm that a really competitive AI version. If you are already working on a similar training environment with a bunch of free/cheap compute jumping in for a weekend or whatever could give decent results, but otherwise you're likely going to get destroyed by bespoke tactics.

mavhc 5y ago

I assumed it was a real robot with onboard processing and was going to make a joke about it using FaaS

gadders 5y ago

Anyone remember Java Tanks?

Jamieee 5y ago
Robocode? https://github.com/robo-code/robocode https://github.com/robo-code/robocode

SavantIdiot 5y ago

RobotWar lives![1] Yay! I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/ Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. Never heard of Faas Wars but now I'm excited to see what it is like. These programming-based games are way more fun, IMHO, than hackathons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar [2] http://corewars.org/ http://corewars.org/

someguyorother 5y ago
> Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. I wonder if one could make a better ML system than genetic programming for creating CoreWar warriors. Perhaps a neural net connected to a differentiable SAT solver?
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > The evolvers sometimes break the bomber-scanner-paper stereotype. They just don't scale well to normal sized cores. That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much./ In fact, it's been about 12 years since I last played around with CoreWars, so I'm not up on the newest theories. It would be interesting to see how a genetic algorithm fares against current ML strategies. I'm completely in the dark as to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero work, I only know classifiers/SSD/autoencoders. Would be fun to learn with this environment tho.
  - someguyorother 5y ago
    > That's interesting that you're familiar with how it scales to different cores; I've never played around with the core parameters that much. It's simply the combinatorial explosion: it's easier to find a surprising and good program in ten lines with pointers limited to a max value of 800, than with hundred lines and a pointer max value of 8000.

judohacker 5y ago

When my daughter was in grade 5, I volunteered to teach programming for an afternoon while the teacher could do one-on-ones. I took Robocode[1], made a basic Robot class that the kids could easily extend, and then taught them just enough logic and syntax so they could have their robots battle their classmates'. It was a huge success. We had to close the door to the classroom because the kids were so loud, cheering their robots on. Whenever a kid was called by the teacher to do their one-on-one, they protested "one more minute, I need to improve my robot!" In September, my daughter starts university in software engineering; mission accomplished! ;) [1] https://robocode.sourceforge.io/ https://robocode.sourceforge.io/

jimmaswell 5y ago
Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the others, same as my compsci professor and some studies said, and my experiences working tutoring suggested.
- KMnO4 5y ago
  I can confirm. I went to a gifted school and Lego Mindstorms was on the curriculum. Then in (conventional) high school I hosted a workshop on beginning Python (with Turtle) and half the people couldn’t understand why x=2 after “x=1” and “x+=1”.
  - xsmasher 5y ago
    They need a consistent framework to understand what is happening - "variables are like little boxes where you can put a number or some letters" and "The equal sign lets you change what is in the box." x+=1 just complicates the situation; use x=x+1 to avoid adding more special rules for now. This stuff is teachable, but it doesn't help that the framework is very different than the similar-looking expressions from math class, where "x=1" followed by "x=2" is not allowed.

schemescape 5y ago

In case anyone on here is interested, I made a simple, in-browser JavaScript robot battle programming game like this (human vs. CPU only) that embeds VS Code's editor: https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/cyber-coliseum https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/cyber-coliseum Don't expect too much -- I just made this for fun :)

kylebolt 5y ago

Very cool, well done.

mrcwinn 5y ago

That's so cool! Great job.

bitcharmer 5y ago

What does serverless mean in this context?

lostinspace 5y ago

Personally, I'd ask a little more than 1k for building a killer robot.