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Comment by Kurtz79 | Hacker News Reader

"The AI must have have near real time performance on CI and qualifying round. Slow response time is grounds for disqualification."

Will bots with a fast response time have an advantage over "slower" (but still meeting the minimum response time) ones ?

If so, for the sake of argument, won't a C bot have an inherent advantage over a python bot ?

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You can get more done in a constant amount of time in C or C++ vs all the other languages, so yes. More compute time == more sophisticated AIs.

C code isn't necessarily more efficient; it's definitely possible to write slow C code if you make poor choices, and the performance-critical work in python can be written in C (it might be already, e.g. if you're using numpy). And if the performance is IO-bound (e.g. communicating with their server), there might be a negligible difference anyway. Also, being high-level can give a big advantage in development time and bug prevention which is more likely than response time to be where things get difficult.

Right, but what's he's getting at is: will a bot that responds faster have an advantage over one that responds slower, even if both respond within the time time limit? Or, is the server waiting for both responses to come in before progressing the world state?

Ah, I see. Well, I misunderstood the question I guess. I'm not sure why my answer was downvoted, however, seeing as I don't think I said anything incorrect, and it is a reasonable (though incorrect) understanding of what he was asking. Namely, responding to the implication that a C bot will be necessarily faster than a python bot.

I agree ;). I didn't down-vote your answer.

I don't want to give any information out before it's revealed to everyone, it wouldn't be fair. I'll just say that the response speed does matter, but at least in our beta tests the benefit of using one language over another was how productive the team was - so I would recommend choosing the language you're most comfortable with. Anyways, you can switch language at any point.

Commands will be sent over a network to the bot, so it's probable that wire latency will be the bottleneck, not the language.

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