[craftit]

It is a fair point, if you want to keep the playing field level and you want to compete on the basis of coding skill then you need to manage the code on the server. Otherwise simple network latency to the server could skew the playing field, assuming it is real-time.

I must admit I just want to experiment with different AI algorithms like deep learning, genetic programming, rule induction and see how they do. I have much of the code already but I am unlikely to get the time to rewrite it, even if could get it to fit within the game environment. Especially as some of the training is best done on a GPU.

[pmlamotte]

You bring up the real-time component, which is something we didn't do and from what I can tell the OP does not plan to do either. Real time is an entirely different beast and something I haven't seen in these types of competitions yet. I'd love to see one that does do it though.

Another cool competition is MIT's Battlecode, which actually gives you a bytecode limit. If your code executes past the bytecode limit, your AI is paused and will actually resume on the next turn, without notification. Thus you'll be continuing with possibly old/dirty data. That pretty much prevents you from using any standard libraries and doing bytecode level optimizations, as well as manually yielding if you know it will take too long.

Your robots also can only talk to each other through a radio API that has limited bandwidth and possible corruption if I recall correctly. It's a complete opposite of what I worked on, where we focused more on strategy rather than code optimization.