Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Show HN: A competition for small neural networks that play strategy games (tinybrains.dev)

78 points by codetiger 20 hours ago

awfm9 11 minutes ago

Man, I remember doing this is 2011 as well. Everything some kind of hand-coded strategy. I enjoyed it a lot.

codetiger 20 hours ago

15yrs back I participated in "Google Ants AI Challenge 2011", an ai programming competition, hosted by the University of Waterloo, and I ranked #127 (#1 in my country). The competition gave me a huge learning oppurtunity where developers across the world came to a forum and discussed various techniques.

Now, I've built a similar platform to bring back the fun of building a small neural network that can play the game well. Neural Network optimization seems to be much more fun.

Plz share your feedback to improve the platform and add more games.

AnotherGoodName 9 hours ago

Nice. I was 72nd. Working in AI research today and still making ai for games as a hobby (tfmbot.com is an ai i’m working on for my favourite board game terraforming mars).

codetiger 9 hours ago

Thanks for sharing. I remember #1 xathis had a score, big leap ahead of others. The difference in techniques in top 100 was almost the same.

atmanactive 16 hours ago

I remember a game on Steam called Tiny Brains, great couch co-op.

adityamishra241 5 hours ago

This looks fun. How do you evaluate the networks — is it purely based on game performance, or are there other metrics like size and inference speed too?

codetiger 2 hours ago

Glad you like it. The evaluation is based purely on game performance. However each weight class is evaluated separately. Nano, micro, mini, small, large and open class.

codetiger 2 hours ago

When you submit a model it participates on both its weight class and the open class

DylanMerigaud 4 hours ago

Great idea to focus on small, efficient neural networks.

willmarch 7 hours ago

Pretty neat! I'm considering entering some models. How long will you be running these competitions?

codetiger 7 hours ago

The current season is a public beta and ends by end of the month. After that am considering 3 month seasons.

willmarch 2 hours ago

Signed up and submitted a test model. Now the real training begins!

Qworg 6 hours ago

Reminds me of MechMania at UIUC - exciting!

adityamishra241 17 hours ago

This looks fun. How small are the networks you're aiming for?

sitzkrieg 11 hours ago

the network size brackets are in TFA:

    nano up to 16 KiB
    micro up to 128 KiB 
    mini up to 1 MiB 
    small up to 8 MiB 
    large up to 64 MiB

codetiger 8 hours ago

Each season has a different weight size restrictions. Currently open season is for a full production test.

cookiengineer 4 hours ago

OMG!

Just yesterday I published my reworked GoNEAT library that implements HyperNEAT combined with phased search and backpropagation [1].

But it's kind of impossible to enter for me because of the hard pytorch requirements :( would love to see the project as a gym, so that you can run your own ANN design algorithm.

I get that most data science students still use python, but the evolutionary world is kinda in C++ and other native languages.

Anyways, great project nonetheless.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/goneat

codetiger 2 hours ago

Where do you see a hard requirement? I have added support for ONNX model upload for now and would love to extend support for other formats. How you build the model is totally upto you. I don’t check anything other than format and inference time and model size.

codetiger 2 hours ago

Saw your repo and understood you question better. The requirement are now limiting Neural Networks only, not a direct algorithm implementation

lostdog 10 hours ago

Cool idea!

It would help to delete all the text on the page, and write it without AI.

For example, "model and manifest bytes together pick the class; every version also plays on Open"

codetiger 9 hours ago

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll take that as top priority.

lokar 10 hours ago

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

cheschire 9 hours ago

Also: https://screeps.com/

codetiger 9 hours ago

Thanks for sharing. The primary reason building this website is to learn small neural networks and tuning.