Restarting the Queue-ICPC?

[Joe Strout]

Is there any interest here in restarting the Queue-ICPC, or something very similar?

I know I'd enjoy it, and I've now got a precocious 13-year-old who wants to participate, and I have nowhere to send him... so I'm more highly motivated than I was last year.

What do you think, all?

Best,
- Joe

[Cosmin Mutu]

Would be nice to get the robot speaking again ;)

+1 for the initiative!

Cheers,
Cosmin Mutu.

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[Perica Zivkovic]

+1

[Dean H.]

Absolutely, I'd be all over another competition. I really enjoyed the two contests that I participated in.

Regards,

Dean

[Claus Makowka]

I would certainly be interested in participating in another challenge. 

Volunteering to help organize another challenge is a much greater commitment.

1. Come up with an interesting game design  (possibly the most difficult part and that would benefit from a brainstorming session with an experienced group).
2. Develop and test the game master that connects the players (could be more than two!) and computes the outcome of the moves.  Many aspects of this are boiler plate communication code that could be borrowed from the framework used in prior challenges, if the source could be obtained.
   
3. Develop and test a basic player to provide as an example and for use in testing.  Some form of this needs to be developed for testing the game master, so this part is not much extra effort, except to separate it from the testing harness.
4. Set up a host for the challenge.  This is relatively easy to do in the cloud these days, but it will probably exceed what is available for free. 
   

In principle items 1 - 3 could be accomplished by volunteers at no cost, but the effort should not be underestimated.  However, I think that for the past challenges there was corporate underwriting by IBM and possibly others for items 1-3.  A university served as host, likely with some corporate funding.

Item 4 will take some funds, but it could be relatively modest, in the range of a few hundred to a thousand dollars for a month of robust server capacity.

[Claus Makowka]

As an alternative, you may want to consider a different kind of game playing that is currently active and has annual competitions.

This is known as General Game Playing (GGP).   Your program must be prepared to play "any" game.   The game is defined in a Game Description Language (GDL), which describes the rules of the game, the initial position, the terminating conditions for the game, and scoring the completed game.   The number of players in the game can range from 1 (puzzles) up to 4 or 6 (could be more but I know of no examples).  Games can be competitive or cooperative.  Most are two player competitive.  The games are deterministic (no random events), finite (will end in a finite number of moves), and perfect information (no hidden information - each player has the same information about the current positions (state) of the game).  Your program will get a description of the game (in GDL) at the start of the game and will have a limited amount of time (< 10 minutes) to analyze the game after which there are turns of fixed duration (depends on the game, 10 - 60 seconds) during which your program must submit a (legal) move, as do all the other players.  Every player submits a move on every turn.  Games where only one player "moves" each turn are simulated by having all the other players with a noop as their only legal move.

For more information see:

• http://www.ggp.org/
  
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Game_Playing
• http://games.stanford.edu/
• http://games.stanford.edu/index.php/ggp-competition-aaai-14
  

One major difference in this competition is that you do not submit your code.  Instead you need to host your code and submit a URL that the game master site uses to contact your player to include it in a game. 

[David Sturgill]

I helped run the Queue ICPC Challenge the three years we were able to offer it. I didn't make the decision to suspend it, but I feel like this was a result of declining participation and the concern that we were not able to offer enough support for the competition.

This may be something we could think bout offering again, if there's some interest. Plus, the regular ICPC Challenge offered as part of the ICPC world finals is taking a break this year, so that frees up some resources. I'll ask at ACM Queue Magazine and see if there's interst in working together to offer another challenge.