We have created a video game that is designed to be played by a small python program, rather than a human. Conference attendees can participate in a tournament where they (either alone or in a team) each submit a bot that will play the game, and at the end of the conference, we will have a tournament session where everyone can come and watch our strange creations play against each other (either brilliantly or it may all go wrong!).
- Create a repository for your bot from the template.
- Register your team: fill in the form at https://forms.gle/TosuLTY1zo59FNSz5 (no limit on the number of participants)
- Read the game rules below and start working on your bot
- Ask questions on the Discord forum
ai-game-tournament - Once your bot is ready, make sure you have merged all your changes into the
mainbranch of the repo you created - Deadline is 13:30 on Friday July 12th
- Tournament will be 14:00 - 15:30 on Friday July 12th in the Open Space area
-
Create a repository for your bot from the template.
-
Get started with:
conda create -n <NAME> -c conda-forge python=3.10.*
conda activate <NAME>
git clone https://github.com/europybots2024/vendeeglobe.git
git clone https://github.com/<USERNAME>/<MYBOTNAME>_bot.git
cd vendeeglobe/
python -m pip install -e .
cd run/
ln -s ../../<MYBOTNAME> .
python play.py
git clone https://github.com/europybots2024/vendeeglobe.git
git clone https://github.com/<USERNAME>/<MYBOTNAME>_bot.git
cd vendeeglobe/
python -m venv .<NAME>
source .<NAME>/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install -e .
cd run/
ln -s ../../<MYBOTNAME> .
python play.py
Note: name the folder containing the bot needs to end with _bot to be picked up by the game!
Around the world sailing race
Preview
- Sail around the world as fast as possible
- Start from les Sables-d’Olonne in France
- There are two mandatory checkpoints
- Each round has a time limit of 8 minutes (=80 days)
- The tournament on the final day consist of 8 rounds, where the scores from each round are summed
- A checkpoint is a location on the globe (latitude+longitude) with a radius
- If you sail within the checkpoint radius, the checkpoint has been reached
- The first mandatory checkpoint is located in the middle of the pacific ocean and has a radius of 2000 km
- The second mandatory checkpoint is located in the middle of the indian ocean and has a radius of 1200 km
- Only the wind is a factor (there are no ocean currents)
- Wind is randomly generated for every game, and stays static for 12 hours during a round
- The angle between ship and wind affects ship speed
- With a wind force of 1, the ship will go as fast as the wind
- Ships will get stuck when reaching land (obviously!), but will not crash: you can turn around
- Ships cannot crash into each other (they behave like ghosts)
- Points from 1st to last place decay exponentially (and depend on the number of players)
- Back home with 2 checkpoints is best (or closest to home)
- Then closest to 2nd checkpoint, then closest to 1st checkpoint
Here is a table that gives the correspondance between real/user time duration and the amount of time that goes by in the game.
| Real/User time | Time in game |
|---|---|
| 8 mins | 80 days |
| 1 min | 10 days |
| 6 sec | 1 day |
| 1 sec | 4 hours |
| 0.25 sec | 1 hour |
- To play the game, you will have to create a Python program.
- It should contain a class named
Botand that class should have a method namedrun. - Every time step, the
runmethod will be called, and it will be inside that function that you should control your ship. - You are provided with a
bot.pyin thetemplate_botrepository to give you an example.
Look at the comments in bot.py for details on what information is available to you at every time step and how to control your vessel.
- The weather
forecastis one of the arguments therunfunction will receive. - It is a method that lets you access the wind data for the 5 days to come (for the entire globe).
- The accuracy of the forecast decreases the further in time you look: the figure below shows the same weather data (value of the horizontal
uwind component) 1 day in the future, and 5 days in the future
- It is a callable which can get the wind horizontal (
u) and vertical (v) vector components for any given location(s) in space (latitude and longitude) and time (from 0 to 5 days).
u, v = forecast(latitudes, longitudes, times)- The
world_mapis another of the arguments received by your bot'srunfunction. - It is also a callable which provides the world map values (1 = sea, 0 = land) for any given latitude(s) and longitude(s):
map_values = world_map(latitudes, longitudes)The bot will control the ship by returning a set of instructions that will then be read and applied by the game engine.
You initialize a Instructions object, and then set one of the following attributes:
Location: a latitude/longitude to go to (using the shortest straight-line path on the surface of the globe, ignoring land mass)Heading: heading for the ship in degrees (East is 0, North is 90, West is 180, South is 270)Vector: vector for the ship (instead of heading)Left: turn left X degreesRight: turn right X degreessail: you can also control the ship's speed by choosing how much sail to deploy (a number between 0 and 1)
There are 4 ways you can speed up your development.
You can show a preview of your course using a course_preview.
This is an argument of the play function.
A list of checkpoints should be supplied:
vendeeglobe.play(...,
course_preview=[
Checkpoint(latitude=43.797109, longitude=-11.264905, radius=50),
Checkpoint(longitude=-29.908577, latitude=17.999811, radius=50),
...
])Note that, while it tries hard to be, the course preview may not be 100% accurate.
You can supply any starting location on the globe, if you want to e.g. test the middle or end part of your course.
vendeeglobe.play(...,
start=vendeeglobe.Location(longitude=-68.004373, latitude=18.180470)
)If you are using a course of checkpoints (as in the template_bot), remember to set all of the checkpoints that come before start to .reached = True!
- Sometimes, it can be a little unclear whether a small island or shallow water is an actual obstacle on the map or not.
- You can use the high-contrast mode to view a two-color map which will clearly differentiate land and sea.
- This can be done by either using the
high_contrast=Trueargument, or using the in-game checkbox in the left side bar.
You can speed up time using e.g. speedup=2.0 as an argument to vendeeglobe.play, but note that this one is a little buggy!
Because the ships advance using a time step mechanism, this may cause you to overshoot a checkpoint (or oscillate around it), or you might crash into land if you're navigating close to a coast line.
- It is strongly recommended to start by just plotting a course (Google Maps is your friend!).
- Explore the map in the game: some parts have deliberately been edited to allow different routes to be taken.
- Unlike in real life, the wind direction is predominantly from East to West.
- Once you have a course that works, you can then start thinking more about the wind.
- The game was developed by @nvaytet and @gergely-elias.
- The game was inspired by the Virtual Regatta game and this cool visualization of wind conditions on Earth.
- The cover image was created using https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/
- We thank the developers at the European Spallation Source's Data Management and Software Center for testing the game!
Python versions known to work: 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12.
Dependencies:
Note: these should all get installed automatically if you used pip install -e . as suggested above.
importlib-resources
matplotlib
numba
numpy
pillow
pyopengl
pyqt5
pyqtgraph
scipy