Halite is an artificial intelligence challenge, by Two Sigma. The competition is mostly about writing a bot which then competes against other players. You are ranked based on how well you do against them.

The goal is to write a program to control a set of bots that can move around on a fixed size board and collect items that are scattered across the map.

I reached the silver league, which is top 25%. With a rank of 730 out of around 3000 competitors.

As per their analysis I made 14 different versions. The first few was me just submitting the tutorial bot. Then the next few was me trying to figure out how their offline tools work and submitting from there. I spent about an hour each of the next times I played with my bot. Making small updates and pushing it out.

Here is a snapshot of a game in which my bot won. My program controls all the bots in red. View the full replay here.

Most of my changes were just slight variations to handle one or two conditions that I saw happening most in the games played by my then bot. I didn’t get to make use of some components like dropoffs etc in the game.

Read more about how the game works in their learn section.

The game is definitely a fun way to experiment with programming in a competitive environment. Didn’t get to spend a lot of time on this contest. But will definitely try to put some time away for this the next time this happens.

View my implementation here.