… but there are some changes to Rock, Paper, Azure we need to discuss based on our test week. First things first: I highly recommend you download the latest Bot Lab and MyBot project here. For the most part, old bots bots will continue to work, but since this was a test round anyway, I highly recommend you upgrade – there are a few edge cases that might break bots, or cases where a bot doesn’t do what you think it would. Let’s discuss all of these changes we’ve made. I’...
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We’ve had a few people ask about getting the following message when submitting bots: Bot contains invalid calls. Please review the official rules for more information. In short, this message means the bot didn’t pass the static analysis tests. On the About the Challenge page, you’ll see this: While this list is subject to change, we do not allow any classes/methods from System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Threading, System.Diagnostics, or System.GC. That list is subject to change, and...
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Over the past few days, we’ve gotten many requests from those outside the United States who would like to play Rock, Paper, Azure. Some have even said, “I don’t care about the prizes, I just want to play!” So what’s the deal? If we could simply enable the contest to be worldwide, that would be awesome! But, when prizes are involved, it’s not a simple matter. There isn’t an easy mechanism by which to say, “it’s ok to enter, you just can’t win.” Just to p...
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If you’re not sure what Rock, Paper, Azure (RPA) is all about, check out the website or look over some of my recent posts. In this series of posts, I want to go into some of the technical nuts and bolts regarding the project. First, you can download Aaron’s original project on github (here and here). The first project is the Compete framework, which is an extensible framework design to host games like Rock, Paper, Scissors Pro! (the second project). The idea, of co...
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I’m pleased to announce that we’re finally launching our Rock, Paper, Azure Challenge! For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with Jim O’Neil and Peter Laudati on a new Azure event/game called Rock, Paper, Azure. The concept is this: you (hopefully) code a “bot” that plays rock, paper, scissors against the other players in the game. Simple, right? Here’s where it gets interesting. Rock, paper, scissors by itself isn’t all that interesting (after all, you can’t really b...
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On Thursday, we’re going to go live with our RockPaperAzure coding challenge – and it’s time to brain dump on some of the lessons learned while building out the solution – some small (like this one), some large. When developing the RPA website, I chose to use ASP.NET Webforms and ASP.NET Ajax. The reason for this is simple … I’m a big fan ASP.NET MVC, but for this, given the very short time frame, it was the fastest route to completion. (For those familiar with Aaron’s base project on Git...
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While building the back end to host our “Rock, Paper, Scissors in the cloud” game, we faced a situation of where/how to store the log files for the games that are played. In my last post, I explained a bit about the idea; in the game, log files are essential at tuning your bot to play effectively. Just to give a quick example of what the top of a log file might look like: In this match, I (bhitney) was playing a house team (HouseTeam4) … each match is made up of potentially thous...
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We’re gearing up for something that I think will be truly exciting – but I’m getting ahead of myself. This is likely going to be a long series of posts, so let me start from the beginning. About a year or so ago, at the Raleigh Code Camp, I stumbled into a coding competition that was run by James Avery and Nate Kohari during a few hours in the middle of the day. The concept was simple: write a program that plays “Rock, Paper, Scissors” – you would take your code, compiled as a DLL, ...
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Many years ago, I was a reasonably active person in computer chess and OTB (over-the-board) chess playing, though admittedly I was more interested in the computer science behind chess rather than my own chess playing strength. I owe this resurgence in my interest to my daughter as her interest in the game has grown. I’ve broken out the nice pieces, chess clock, and of course, software! I’ve been searching for casual chess meetups in the Greensboro, NC area, and haven’t had much luck...
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There aren’t too many Acer 1420P netbooks out there – this is the one given out at PDC 2009. I was recently having some problems with it and needed to disassemble (to the bone). If you’ve ever disassembled a laptop, you know you pretty much need a service manual to guide you. I love my laptops, but working on them makes me really appreciate the modular ATX design in many desktops.
The problem was finding the service manual – I’m not exactly sure where I ...
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