Breakpoint LIVE! + PHL Code Club - BATTLE SNAKES HACKATHON
Join us for a fun hackathon! (By Sentry.io)
What is BattleSnake?
Battlesnake is a competitive programming game where your code is the controller.
Come all and join us for a fun night of friendly competition. Build your competitor ahead of time or on the spot (probably not the most ideal) and battle against others to see who can survive the longest. Eat “food” to grow your snake in size, taking over the board. Crash into other snakes and you’re done. May the best algorithm win.
What are we doing?
Participants will be creating their own web server (read the docs to get a better idea of what is required). We will create a bracket the day of based on who is in attendance, then run our snakes against each other to see whose algorithm wins. This will be a bog standard single elimination tournament. Once you die, that’s it.
What you need
Some level of coding knowledge or willingness to learn as you go. We will be there to help!
A battle snake coded and ready to go (If you want to do this day of, more power to ya!).
This consists of 3 things:
A web server that responds to requests from the BattleSnake API
This is probably the easiest part, and there are tons of starter templates available!
Some sort of way to decide what your move is going to be
This could be something simple like always turn left or use some more sophisticated algorithms such as A* or flood fill. You could even train a neural net if you want to!
Take a look at the game rules to understand how you can go about choosing your move.
Also take a look at the BattleSnake docs entry on useful algorithms.
A publicly addressable hostname or IP address.
One option is to use a tunneling service like ngrok to run your snake locally, but we suggest hosting it somewhere such as Akamai, Hetzner or Digital Ocean.
Also checkout this BattleSnake docs entry.
What you don't need
We don’t like sore losers, if you’re going to be a stink to other players about losing, please sit this one out.
NOTE: Your battle snake can be written in any tech stack you prefer, you’re also more than welcome to join as a spectator (Be sure to pick the snake you’re rooting for though)!
Schedule
6pm
Doors open and social time
6:30pm
We will sit down and give a brief introduction to the setup and rules of the game.
6:45pm
Challenge Time!
We will have the battles displayed on a screen for your viewing pleasure.
8:15pm
Closing remarks and a couple final minutes for chatting and socializing
🎤 Call for speakers!
We are community-run, have an idea for a talk? We'd love to host you. We're open to all software-engineering-related talks. Have something interesting to share or teach? We want to hear it!
🗣️ Your Host
Kyle Tryon (@techsquidtv) is a Philly-based developer, content creator, and DevEx Engineer at Sentry.
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