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Hangman Tournament
by: micah | August 28th, 2009 |
Several months ago, I hosted the Ruby Battleship Tournament. It was an all-round fun event where craftsmen sharpened their claws and pitted their skills against their peers. Since then, there has been much interest in the next tournament.
Today I am announcing the commencement of the Ruby Hangman Tournament. In this tournament your challenge is to build an AI to play hangman. Unlike Battleship, your AI will not battle against opponents, but will instead play solo. You must teach your player how find words as accurately and as quickly as possible.
The most prodigious player will be dubbed Tournament Champion. But this is a tournament of Craftsmanship, so the ultimate title will be awarded to the Tournament Master. To earn this most prestigious of monikers, your player must not only play hangman spectacularly, but also be crafted with the utmost quality of code.
Getting started is easy. Simply follow the instructions to get a default AI generated and running on your computer. Then all you have to do is tweak the solution to be as good as you can get it before the end of September.
This is a great way to practice your craft. You could introduce the tournament in your next user group meeting. Show it to your peers over lunch and learn.
You can also just play the game if you like (screenshot below). Good luck!
August 28th, 2009 at 04:32 PM
Thanks to Steven Soroka for helping out in the preparation for this tournament.
August 28th, 2009 at 04:40 PM
Can't wait to compete. :) I can still compete, can't I? :D
August 28th, 2009 at 08:31 PM
Awesome! Can't wait to give it a try.
September 3rd, 2009 at 03:39 PM
(sorry about the last comment – hit enter by mistake)
Is the mailing list working properly? I posted a question to sparring-hangman@rubyforge.org but it doesn't show up in the archives, and when I look at the subscriber list I only see myself.
Oh, and thanks for running this – been looking forward to it since hearing about the battleships contest at SC2009.
September 6th, 2009 at 04:21 AM
Sounds great, I just started coding it up :)
I'm curious though.. How will the quality of the code be judged? And what about beauty, is that not a factor?
September 6th, 2009 at 05:12 AM
I am having issues with the analysis tools. Getting the error "No such file or directory - File not fond - /tmp/saikuro/index_cyclo.html when it does the flay score.
Running flay from the command line on my project, however, does work.
September 7th, 2009 at 01:58 PM
It complains about flog not being installed. I installed flog 2.2.0 ? Should I install another version?
Kevin, this worked for me:
mkdir -p /tmp/saikuro touch /tmp/saikuro/index_cyclo.html
September 8th, 2009 at 07:46 PM
Kerry, Might want to check your spam for a confirmation email about the email list. Alternatively, follow the twitter user: http://twitter.com/CodeSparring
September 8th, 2009 at 07:51 PM
ehsanul, There are some code analysis checks that you can perform with the provided hangman Limelight production. This should give you a good indication of how your player will be scored.
Beauty is definitely a factor. You should aim to write beautiful code. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there are no metric tools to measure beauty specifically. So for this tournament, beauty is not a scoring category.
September 8th, 2009 at 07:53 PM
Joel, A new version of the hangman production was released that makes use of Flog 2.2.0 and fixes the problem with Saikuro. Reopen the hangman.lll file and you should get all the changes.
September 11th, 2009 at 03:43 AM
Thanks. It works fine now!
September 20th, 2009 at 12:45 AM
Has anyone had any luck getting limelight to find their gems directory in windows 7/Vista? The gemhome.txt file in Users/myname doesnt seem to work...Possibly because Documents and Settings is no longer a real directory?