I've got 10 btc for the best CoffeeScript/JavaScript Nodewar bot

I am really excited about this. Here's some feedback from my first impressions:

1. Offline support: I'd love to work on this offline, write unit tests, use vim, all those nice things. You mentioned elsewhere that you're running the server-side simulation in Node—would be great if that was open sourced. :)

2. Better auto-saving: If offline support isn't available, editing online needs to be improved. I was messing around with my AI while on a shuttle with flaky WiFi. I saved my progress and navigated away. Later I came back, and turned out my progress was not saved. (a) Let me know if saving failed? (b) Maybe use LocalStorage as a fallback?

3. Better built-in library for common operations: o.lib.physics is a great start, but I'd love to not have to implement things like: "orbit around TARGET at distance X", "maintain distance X from TARGET", "orient towards (or away from) TARGET", etc. Sounds like these kinds of libraries could sprout organically from the community, but it's not obvious where to find them.

> In the unlikely case something very bad happens to bitcoins between now and then (or ours are stolen or become unavailable for reasons outside our control), we reserve the right to pay $2,000USD instead.

Does this go both ways? What if Bitcoins are worth $500 USD at come award time? Will you still be paying in BTC, or will you just pay $2,000 USD instead?

Great game! However, I would suggest changing the behaviour of the moons.

Right now the moons are such a big threat that the best way to win is to simply devote all resources to avoiding them, and hope the enemy collides with them before you do (as all the top bots in the ladder clearly demonstrate). This not a very fun strategy and makes for quite boring matches.

One way to avoid this problem is to make the moons harmless. They still pull you in and push you around, but when you collide with them nothing happens. Thus they would no longer be the biggest threat on the field, but rather a nonfatal annoyance. The biggest threat on the field would instead be your enemy, and to increase your chances of winning you have no choice but to actively try to kill him.

The moons will still have to be dealt with accordingly by the ships if they want to be effective, but a majority of the resources will now go towards battling enemy ships. Much more fun to code and to watch.

The Nature of Code [1] has some nice examples on how to calculate steering/acceleration behavior for targeting.

http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/

What's up with the sign up form? What the hell does @name mean?

A twitter username? Does it have to be twitter? Is it just a regular username? Then why does it have an @ sign? Do I need to enter an @ sign or are you going to prepend it after I submit the form?

Edit: okay, so it prepends the @ as you type. Now I'm even more confused about whether or not it's supposed to be my twitter username or not.

Edit 2: Signed up, seems to be just a username. The website refers to usernames in the same way as twitter? The top bar says '@<username>' and links to the account settings. On the home page it links two @usernames to twitter, not a website profile. On the ladder, it shows more @usernames but don't link to twitter and look like they will link to user profiles.

Please don't mix twitter usernames with your site's usernames, it's confusing, especially when some are internal links and some are twitter links.

Anyways, awesome site, reminds me of the google ai challenges. I hope you keep this open perpetually though, or keep running different challenges. Sucks that the google ai challenges only run once a year.

Been playing with this for a few hours. Very interesting stuff!

I'll second what shazow said about auto-saving and resiliancy to internet/browser issues. The page has crashed multiple (7-10) times in Chrome. Fortunately I didn't lose too much, but even losing a couple obscure changes is rather annoying.

The UI for reloading your own species was rather confusing at first. I thought when I reloaded the page I would have my species there already and freaked out when it wasn't! Eventually I figured out I had to Add Team with my existing team.

I'd love to have a bit more robust vector libraries, such as doing vector dot product (vector projection) and vector rejection, in additional to just speedTowards.

It would be particularly helpful during testing & debugging to have a mode with no moons, or perhaps just a single static moon in the center. Continue having the three moons for ladder and competition, but it'd be super to have the more basic map to make it easier while training my geometries how to move and maneuver. Maybe limit the option to when only one team is loaded.

Thanks!

Is this supposed to happen? http://youtu.be/vndQFnesPT8

edit: specifically, the part at the end when the moons fly off the screen, the world shrinks to nothing, and the counter on the right expands wildly.

I created a typescript declaration file for the environment of nodewar, if someone wants to try writing it in TS. https://github.com/JacekLach/NodeWarTyped

Cool. I've played with a few of these over the past several years but the problem was typically few participants and no incentive to win. This one shouldn't have either problem, plus it's not C++! (I hope they get ClojureScript working in the next few days, but JS is so much better for this sort of thing than C++...) How often do ladder matches get scheduled and played?

No undo in the editor makes things a bit painful. It just eats CTRL+Z, so If you accidentally delete a line, you pretty much have to exit (remembering not to save), remove your team, re-add it, and click edit again.

Other than that, I forsee thousands of dollars in otherwise billable hours evaporating before my eyes. Nice work!

Looks amazing. It bothered me that I had to sign up to watch the replays though, it's a pretty big threshold and I almost didn't. You might want to have a demo because watching a replay really is quite convincing. I don't know any JavaScript, but this seems like an amazing way to learn.

crud, I've been nerd-sniped... guess I know what I'll be doing at nights now.

It looks like the API doesn't give access to the whole shape of a ship - only its centroid position and the direction of the sharpest vertex. Do the other vertices not matter? In any case, we should probably be able to compute which edge we would be splitting and stuff like that.

I have ported a programming game http://terrariumjs.wiselabs.net a while ago (javascript).

You can write the AI of a herbivor or carnivor, and try to invade other people's terrariums :) The documentation is a bit lacking though.

i would love to be able to use machine learning with this. for example, if you released the "universe simulator" in a binary/open source would be more than enough to start.

any thoughts on this from the creators of the project?

Is there no way to get the direction vector of the ship? You have rotation in radians, but no way to convert that.. not even cos/sin to roll it yourself. Am I missing something?

> vectors are 2-item arrays (for example, a velocity might be [2.3, -1.2])

Would be nice if they mentioned what each item was. Is it magnitude + direction or deltaX, deltaY?

I like the idea, never participated in this kind of competition. However I had to write an AI for a same kind of game in college. It was a 2d football simulater and we had to write the AI in haskell. The tactics however had nothing to do with real life football (rushing was the best strategy). Does anybody here know if this is an evolution of an existing game, or did the creators invented this game by their self's?

Can I remove my node from the ladder? I am so ashamed.

Haven't received a verification email, can't create species, can't edit profile to check my email was correct ... want to play ...

It seems that the ladder updates are slow. Is it intentional that each bot gets one match per hour? Is it processing power determined? If the latter, can we somehow contribute cycles to it?

I've got a piece of iron sitting mostly idly, so I could spare a VPS. I guess many people here could pledge something similar for a fun project like this.

Put this together (quickly) so I can dev locally and upload new code with a single command: https://github.com/mikeycgto/nodewar-tools

My "species" code then uses grunt for all sorts of awesomeness (basic tests, concatenation of files and autoupload on save).

Can I just see some matches without signing up? Juts a video if you must.

Awesome. I would love to participate, but I think my exams will get in the way. :(

Downloading a replay is taking a very long time. Also, is there an easy way to plot things like projection vectors?

A thing I would love is deploy via git push.

Simply activate a post-push hook that runs a specifically named js/coffee file!

This would both accomodate for offline editing and any compile-to-js language.

Sweet.

Now, is there any way to code in ones editor of choice and deploy from the command line? Chrome tab crashed on me while I was editing my species and I lost all of my changes.

This looks ace. I haven't looked into it much, but is not knowing either of the languages going to be an issue? Or should I be able to pick up what I need easily?

Do any beginners want to team up? Going to give this a try to learn more JS and learn how to build an autonomous agent, I don't have any intention on winning.

It would be great for debugging purposes if all ships could return an array of color coded vectors (or even just a single vector) to display every step.

This looks pretty awesome! I'm going to try my hand at a species today. FYI, the confirmation email went to my junk mail box on Gmail.

IBM offered games like this through their academic initiative when I was in school.

Cool idea moving it into modern JS environment.

The amount of effort I put into this is directly proportional to how much Mt. Gox is being hacked or DDOS'd. Lol.

This is awesome fun! Just spent my whole evening toying around with it. GOGOGO Prima Polys and Totally Turtle!

Is it possible to send positions/result to an outside server to use some kind of genetic algorithm ?

Great way to short sell BTC!

This has potential to be really fun! But how to select others to compete?

"Create a species" doesn't seem to work, even with all fields filled out.

for luddites, 10 Btc = $300-2000 depending on the exchange rates of the past two months, or even possibly $5000 by the time you win. Possibly a quite uncertain prize!

I want to play, my JS is good, my geometry/math is not :(

Would be handy to expose the AI step delta in the API.

Where can I find what 'speed_to_nearest_moon' does?

how do i compete against others in the ladder?

i have a team that seems to beat anyone i test against, but i can't figure out how to rank up.

I'm having way too much fun with this.

not worth quite as much as 14 hours ago hah