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Tron server with Elo ratings

game

The Google AI Challenge 2010 was hosted by the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo during February 2010 and ended February 26th 2010.
Results of the final tournament were published March 1st 2010.
Congratulations to all participants, especially to the winner Andy Sloane (a1k0n), and to the contest organizers for hosting such a captivating contest!

This year's task was to write a program that would play games of Tron against other participants' programs.
Participants wrote programs in a variety of programming languages and uploaded their source code to the contest server, which compiled the programs and ran the binaries against each other.

Due to the popularity of the contest, the contest server was becoming a limited resource. Near the end of the contest, each program was getting its first 20-30 games quickly, but further games were rarely played.
Moreover, the contest server, at the time, didn't calculate Elo ratings, and matching of players was purely random. The maps being played were small, so games wouldn't take too long.
This created some frustration, especially among the participants with good preliminary rankings. They wanted to play more games, and play more against stronger opponents, on maps that represented the final tournament.

That's when the idea was born for participants to play directly against each other. Since the contest was still on-going, participants didn't want to share their source code with others, yet.


You can connect your unmodified bot to this server using tcptron.c.
This engine will connect to the server over TCP/IP to fetch maps and send moves. You will be running your bot yourself, and neither your source code nor executable ever leave your machine.
The server code is open source, too.

Matching of players is based on Elo points, you'll play against the available opponent with the Elo points closest to yours.
Maps are chosen randomly from a pool which consists of all maps from the most recent starter package, plus some new maps suggested in the forums. We can play 50x50 maps without burdening any server!
Timing rules are slightly relaxed, due to network latency. You're still expected to produce a reply as per the official rules.
Your machine's speed may affect the ranking. If your machine is significantly faster or slower than the official tournament server, consider the effect.

See Bayesian-Elo for details about the ratings below. Output is produced with command sequence: readpgn, mm, advantage 0, exactdist, ratings.
Updated once a minute. This server is run by Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei), contact daniel@benzedrine.ch if you have questions.

Here's the source code of dhartmei's tronbot (rank 80 in the final tournament screenshot, C++).

Here's the gallery with some games visualised as animated GIFs.


More reading:
Last updated on Tue Sep 26 08:57:43 2017 by daniel@benzedrine.ch.