Snakeathon Results

Bright and early at 2PM on a Saturday, teams of Snakeathoners descended upon the Moore 100 Lab. Instructions were given out, a short demonstration and algorithm walk-through was held, and the Snakeathon begun.

3 rounds, 8 and a half hours of coding, 6 pizzas and 20-some ounces of coffee later, the winners emerged - the few, the proud, the top Snake Bot in each category. The Dining Philosophers and WICS officially congratulate:

Alen Kubati and Preetam D'Souza for their AlenPreenamBot, which took First Place in both the Single Player and FFA Vector Snake rounds,

Robert Mead, whose SexyGameBot took First Place in the Multi-Player Round, and

Jim Grandpre, whose JBot took second place in both the Single Player and Multi-Player rounds.

How it Went:
Contestants (in teams of one or two) were given a Snake-Playing Framework and a simple API to plug their bot in, in Java. In the allotted 3 hours, contestants had to implement a Snake-Playing bot and submit it to the live leaderboard, in a netflix-on-steroids style AI hackathon. As contestants began hacking away at the problem, the provided SampleBot dominated the charts for the initial hour. As submissions began pouring in, contestants watched the leaderboard to see whether some new fix or tweak to their algorithm would give their bot the necessary edge. As the deadline approached and Pizza arrived, cries of "just give me a couple more minutes" were sympathized with but ultimately ignored, as AlenPreenamBot, in a come-from-behind spectacle, took a new high score and the lead just as time expired.

Round Two added a multi-player component; players' snakes no longer just ate candy but also needed to avoid other players and, if possible, attempt to trap them (earning additional points). As participants adjusted their algorithms for the appearance of others, the live leaderboard began taking a fairly large amount of time to refresh results, since every contestant now had to play every other contestant to get a fair ranking of 'top bot'. This was fixed in the third-round by changing to an FFA (Free-For-All) format.

As contestants struggled to add some rational expectation of others' moves to their Algorithms, a number of interesting situations began to emerge. In one, two snakes stubbornly attempted to eat the same candy repeatedly but were unable, since the interfered with one another's movements. In another, the famous Twitter 'Fail Whale' seemed to emerge spontaneously. SexyGameBot, who had been leading this round took first place with 29734 points, a comfortable 7,000 point margin ahead of its nearest competitor.

Round Three changed the multi-player format to a free-for-all and removed restrictions on directions players could move. The result was Chaos. Jim Grandpre's JBot appeared to lead up to the end, despite only moving in the four cardinal directions. Two last-minute submissions by Jim and the team of Alen & Preenham, however, tilted the scales decidedly towards the latter, giving them the second victory in a row. "If I hadn't gone with my new bot, I may have won," said Jim. Touche.

Full results of the final scores can be found here.

For more information contact alexeym[at]seas.upenn.edu