CODECLASH.md

[CodeClash] Halite

This is the starter codebase for the Halite arena featured in CodeClash.

The code represented in this codebase is a mirror of the Halite repository found at https://github.com/HaliteChallenge/Halite. Our thanks to Michael Truell, Benjamin Spector, and the great Halite community for open-sourcing this code!

We make several modifications to the original Halite codebase to better suit the CodeClash environment:

• Reduced number of supported languages: The original Halite codebase supports 15 languages - we limit the code options to 4 (C, C++, OCaml, Rust) for the following reasons:
  • We omit Python and JavaScript, despite how easy it is to support them, because they are represented in other languages
  • We omit the other 15 - 4 - 2 = 9 languages because they are either niche or hard to support in an automated setting
  • We keep the above languages because they are popular and not represented in other CodeClash arenas
• Add a submission/ folder: To facilitate submission handling for potentially multiple languages, we ask the player to put any relevant bot code in the submission/ folder. The folder can contain multiple files and subfolders as needed, but needs to satisfy the following criteria:
  • There must be a single entry point file named main.<ext>, where <ext> is one of the supported language extensions (c, cpp, ml, rs)
  • The entry point file must be located directly in the submission/ folder (i.e., not in a subfolder)
  • The entry point file must implement the Halite bot.

We automate the compilation and execution of the bot with these mappings:

# Command to be run in each agent's `submission/` folder to compile agent
MAP_FILE_TYPE_TO_COMPILE = {
    ".cpp": "g++ -std=c++11 {path}.cpp -o {name}.o",
    ".c": "gcc {path}.c -o {name}.o",
    ".ml": "ocamlbuild -lib unix {name}.native",
    ".rs": "cargo build",
}

# Command to be run from `environment/` folder to run competition
MAP_FILE_TYPE_TO_RUN = {
    ".c": "./{path}/{name}.o",
    ".cpp": "./{path}/{name}.o",
    ".ml": "./{path}/{name}.native",
    ".rs": "./target/debug/{path}",
}