Overview

This was a sweet hackathon put on by sendwithus in Victoria, BC. It is based on the snake arcade game.

Objective:

1. Eat food.
2. Don't accidentally kill yourself.
3. Kill other snakes.

Our original submission didn't fare too well in the tournament - we slithered right off the board! It was a thrill to watch the competition, but that was a disappointing loss.

Bitten by the challenge, I played with it at home and built my own strategy. Currently, this snake teasingly targets the nearest snake and follows it very closely... carefully dodging when the snake is growing and prioritizing food when it starts to get low on life.

I would have liked to implement some graph searching algorithms that allows the snake to see further into the future and optimize for every move. Also, it would have been a big advantage to be able to target snakes and intercept their path with my body or lock them into a corner. Maybe next year!

Offical Docs

A simple BattleSnake AI written in Python. Available live at battlesnake-python.herokuapp.com.

To get started you'll need a working Python 2.7.6+ development environment and should be familiar with deploying Python apps to Heroku.

If you don't have a Python environment setup, we suggest starting here. You'll need pip and virtualenv for dependency management. We also suggest using virtualenvwrapper.

This AI client uses the bottle web framework for route management and response building, and the gunicorn web server for running bottle on Heroku.

Dependencies are listed in requirements.txt.

Running the AI locally

Fork and clone this repo:

> git clone [email protected]:sendwithus/battlesnake-python.git
> cd battlesnake-python

Create new virtualenv (using virtualenvwrapper) and install dependencies:

> mkvirtualenv battlesnake-python
> workon battlesnake-python
> pip install -r requirements.txt

** Use your venv like this: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-python#declare-app-dependencies **

Run the server locally:

> ./run
Bottle v0.12.8 server starting up (using WSGIRefServer())...
Listening on http://localhost:8080/
Hit Ctrl-C to quit.

Test client in your browser: http://localhost:8080

Deploying to Heroku

Create a new Heroku app:

heroku create [APP_NAME]

Push code to Heroku servers:

git push heroku master

Open Heroku app in browser.

heroku open

Or go directly to: http://APP_NAME.herokuapp.com

You can also view liveserver logs with the heroku logs command:

heroku logs --tail

Questions?

Email, Twitter