My Halite-III Clojure Bot
Halite.io is the site of an annual bot competition that 2-Sigma puts on. This year, Halite III, is set in an ocean where we have underwater ships searching for halite. It is used as both a currency to build as well as the game winning condition: the player with the most stored halite (deposited at a depot or shipyard) at the end of the game wins.
The detailed rules are available on the Learn link.
Starting Out
We start with a shipyard and 5000 halite. The starter kit bot creates ships whenever there is enough stored halite and a ship is not occupying the shipyard. Ships gather halite unless the cell has less than 10% of the maximum per cell, then it moves randomly.
First Improvement
One improvement that immediately would improve performance of the
bot would be to store the last assigned task of a ship. For example,
if it was gathering, that state could be used to help decide what
its next task is. If the ship was returning to the depot or
shipyard, it could ignore cells unless it needed to “top off” its
cargo hold. For this, I’m assigning it a key of :task with a
symbol value of :gather or :return.
Planned Improvements or Strategies
- Build depots
- On heavy halite deposits
- Near opponent depots/shipyards
- Better navigation
- Mark position risks before ship commands
- Decide move based on risk, target, and task
- Different gathering strategies
- Choose different % of cell halite to leave
- Gather near an opponent
- Only within given radius of depot or shipyard
- Gather near opponent occupied space
- Decide how much to influence them (since it’s mutual)
- Collide with opponent ships
- Occupy opponent depots
- Requires bot to examine what’s in a cell
- An opponent bot may also do this to this bot
- Crash-ships over depots/shipyards at game ending
- Calculate cost to move from a cell at time of map update
- Flag high-value targets at time of map update