RPS Hackathon @ Fractal: Hackathon Instructions

How it Works

Rock Paper Scissors

Image by Enzoklop under CC BY-SA 3.0
  • Rock defeats scissors, scissors defeats paper, and paper defeats rock
  • You get +1 point for a win, -1 for a loss, and 0 for ties

Competition Rounds

There will be 8 7 rounds of RPS competitions. Each will have:

  • 1 bot entered by each participant
  • Between 1 and 4 environment bots (bots that we make)

You’ll play 1000 games against each other bot twice.

Environment Bots

Each environment bot that enters during a round will stay for all future rounds.

After each round, you’ll see the names of the bot(s) that were in the previous round. Often these will be hints about what the bot(s) are doing.

Submissions

  • For each competition, you can submit up to the end of that round
  • Starting in the 2nd round, each submission during the round will receive a test result based on how that bot would have done in the previous round
    • Doing better in the previous round is a sign of progress, but may not actually result in a better score in the current round, which will have updated participant bots and new environment bots
  • The final submission before the end of the round will be entered into that round’s competition
  • At the end of each round, we’ll run the tournament and show the results

Scoring

At the end of each round, you’ll get the following information:

  • Matrix score report with results against every other bot
    • Your score is reported as profit per 100 games
  • Game histories for the first and last 100 games against each other bot (200 game histories total out of the 1000 played)
    • This includes the names of the environment bots, which often will be hints about how they play

Your cumulative score is the sum of all of the round scores, where the first round is worth 1x and each future round increases by 1.2x (i.e. round 2 1.2x, round 3 1.44x, etc.).

Prizes

There will be small on-theme prizes for the winners of each round and a larger on-theme prize for the winner overall. Winners are determined by highest score.

Strategy

Your mission is to play well against the environment bots without getting counterplayed by other participant bots.

Strategy vs. Environment Bots

The 200 games that are shown against the environment bots will generally be very useful, because they will reveal patterns in the bot play. Combine this with the sometimes-revealed bot names, and you’ll be able to develop a strong strategy against these bots for future rounds.

Strategy vs. Participant Bots

Look for patterns. If participant bots are only trying to exploit environment bots, then they might be exploitable themselves.

Writing Bots

Click here for our guide on getting started writing RPS bots.

Schedule

10:30am: Doors open

11:00am: Arrival and setup

11:30am: Begin Competition 1

12:00pm: Competition 1 results, begin Competition 2

12:30pm: Competition 2 results, begin Competition 3

  • Pizza lunch

1:00pm: Competition 3 results, begin competition 4

1:30pm: Competition 4 results, begin Competition 5

2:00pm: Competition 5 results, begin Competition 6

2:30pm: Competition 7 results, begin Competition 7

3:00pm: Competition 7/final results and bot explanations

  • Hangout

5:00pm: End

Why?

Fun! And thinking about strategy in a repeated game against a variety of opponents.

From DeepMind in 2023:

In sequential decision-making, agent evaluation has largely been restricted to few interactions against experts, with the aim to reach some desired level of performance (e.g. beating a human professional player). We propose a benchmark for multiagent learning based on repeated play of the simple game Rock, Paper, Scissors.