Halite (the game) is a multiplayer turn-based strategy game played on a rectangular grid; the objective of the game is to take over the entire grid and eliminate the other players in the game.
Halite (the tournament) is an online programming competition where human coders write bots that play the Halite game against each other.
The Halite game was created by Benjamin Spector and Michael Truell during a summer internship at Two Sigma in 2016.
The game format is inspired by the 2011 Ants AI Challenge sponsored by Google.
Halite’s creators heard about the Ants AI Challenge a few years too late :-(
They couldn’t find any other competitions quite like it, so they decided to create one.
The goal of Halite is to provide a fun and deep testbed to try new ideas and compete in problem-solving. Furthermore, Halite is being used for recruitment of talent by its sponsors.
The Halite game has been designed and implemented by Two Sigma, a highly-innovative, technological investment firm based in New York City.
The Halite tournament is jointly run with Cornell Tech, a new graduate school that brings together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs, and students in a catalytic environment to produce visionary results grounded in significant needs that will reinvent the way we live in the digital age.
The tournament will run from November 2, 2016 to February 2, 2017.
Rankings are based on the outcome of organized games where bots play against each other. A good analogy is the Elo rating system used for chess.
More precisely, rankings are computed using a Bayesian algorithm variant of the Glicko system, specifically using the TrueSkill Python library available here.
Winners are simply the highest ranked players on the leaderboard at the end of the competition. So, submit early and often!
Pride! Bragging rights! Internet royalty!
The results of the competition will be officially announced with a link to best players Github profiles.
We store the email, username, and unique identifier that Github provides when you login to the halite.io website via Github OAuth.
We check to see if the domain of the email associated with your Github account is on our whitelist.
Is your organization not on there? Edit the whitelist and send us a pull request! We'll make sure to tag all members of your organization who have already signed up.
Yes. Halite is a programming competition. You need to program a bot that will play the game in the Halite tournament.
However, you definitely don’t have to be a very good programmer to play Halite effectively. Success is more about coming up with a good strategy to play the game than coding this strategy expertly.
Any and all! If the language can read from stdin and print to stdout, we can support it.
We provide out-of-the-box starter packages for the following languages: Python, Java and C++. See here for our growing list of starter packages.
We’re counting on the community to add support for as many languages as people want. Visit this page for more information on writing your own starter package and the protocol used by the game environment to talk to your bot.
To submit your bot, you'll first need to zip your source code. Then, after signing in, click the "Submit" button on the top-right part of the page. Then, simply select your zipped source code to submit.
Yes.
Check out our Github repo and you are also welcome (even encouraged) to open issues and/or submit pull requests.
You can open an issue or submit a pull request on our Github Repo. If you are looking for things to do, checkout our open issues.
Please check/post on the Halite forums or contact-us at halite@halite.io.