545-Person Programming War Declares a Winner 57
An anonymous reader writes: A while back we discussed Code Combat, a multiplayer game that lets players program their way to victory. They recently launched a tournament called Greed, where coders had to write algorithms for competitively collecting coins. 545 programmers participated, submitting over 126,000 lines of code, which resulted in 390 billion statements being executed on a 673-core supercomputer. The winner, going by the name of "Wizard Dude," won 363 matches, tied 14, and lost none! He explains his strategy: "My coin-collecting algorithm uses a novel forces-based mechanism to control movement. Each coin on the map applies an attractive force on collectors (peasants/peons) proportional to its value over distance squared. Allied collectors and the arena edges apply a repulsive force, pushing other collectors away. The sum of these forces produces a vector indicating the direction in which the collector should move this turn. The result is that: 1) collectors naturally move towards clusters of coins that give the greatest overall payoff,
2) collectors spread out evenly to cover territory. Additionally, the value of each coin is scaled depending on its distance from the nearest enemy collector, weighting in favor of coins with an almost even distance. This encourages collectors not to chase lost coins, but to deprive the enemy of contested coins first and leave safer coins for later."
Core War (Score:5, Informative)
How about Core War?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.koth.org/info/akdew... [koth.org]
http://blog.codinghorror.com/c... [codinghorror.com]
Re:Interdisciplinary crossover (Score:5, Informative)
Re: $5.74 == Wow hardware resources have become ch (Score:4, Informative)
It really depends on your calculations (yes, I work in academic research). You can get very large, very parallel problems and have enough with 56k modems in between nodes and there are those where 12x Infiniband is not enough. It also depends on the person implementing the system, how well versed they are in the subject matter and cluster programming, the languages they use and whether or not what they write is aware of what is happening where.
The fabric can be relatively cheap actually, 24 port 10Gbps and QDR Infiniband switches can be had sub-5k these days (unless you go Cisco off course) especially in blade systems. All-in-all the hardware for clusters has gotten very, very cheap. Amazon wouldn't be selling it at $5/h if it weren't profitable.
Large research clusters BTW (such as the ones at Fermilab, CERN or your average University) are usually large sets of 2/4/8 core systems, sometimes with a few very large nodes thrown in or these days a set of GPU nodes. 20-core nodes are rare in actual clusters a la Blue Gene/Q