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Posted by codetiger 2 days ago

Show HN: A competition for small neural networks that play strategy games(tinybrains.dev)
108 points | 40 comments
codetiger 2 days 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.

nickledave 1 day ago||
Nice work, the new site looks great.

Can you give more background on the Ants game?

I didn't find it on the current site or the older one.

Was the game inspired by anything like agent-based simulations?

I'm not super interested in what the tech industry is calling "agentic" AI, but I am interested in collective intelligence, see David Ha's work in this area: - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114... - https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/105817

Would be cool if each ant itself could be an agent

codetiger 1 day ago||
Unfortunately the competition site is mostly down and couldn't find much about the old competition other than the participants blog articles. Do a search on "Google Ants AI Challenge - post mortem", and you get a lot of articles around the game.

Thanks for sharing the research. I tried implementing a per Ant decision making model, but gave up as the training time was much longer compared to the current baseline. I think I should rethink the idea.

AnotherGoodName 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago|||
I remember a game on Steam called Tiny Brains, great couch co-op.
Muthaalagan 1 day ago||
From competing with the world to building a place for the world to compete—what a full-circle moment. Love the challenge: how much strategy can a tiny neural network learn? Excited to see what people build.
euroderf 1 day ago||
Let's play real stuff.

"Playing Hex and Counter Wargames using Reinforcement Learning and Recurrent Neural Networks"

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13918

TeMPOraL 22 hours ago|
Is "Hex" real stuff? I know that from university AI courses, from before current ML phase. I thought this was a toy game invented specifically to be nice for AI exercises - bounded, easy to follow, moderate branching factor, and designed to make ties impossible.
euroderf 19 hours ago||
No no no it's not a game named Hex. It's a gaming genre where units move on a field of hexagons.
b800h 17 hours ago||
Around 1997 there was something awfully similar to this doing the rounds, called AI Wars. IIRC it was code rather than weights, but it's a funny parallel. 30 years! God I'm old.
adityamishra241 10 hours ago||
I remember the Google Ants challenge being pretty interesting. What made you choose strategy games for the new competition instead of something simpler like classic board games?
codetiger 5 hours ago|
I wanted to build games that are multiple-decision and control many things for each turn
WanderZil 1 day ago||
This reminds me of John Conway's Game of Life. I wonder what surprises we could get by combining Game of Life with neural networks
Muthaalagan 1 day ago||
Interesting—how small can a neural network get and still make good strategic decisions? Curious whether these models can adapt to unfamiliar opponents.
adityamishra241 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago||
When you submit a model it participates on both its weight class and the open class
awfm9 1 day ago||
Man, I remember doing this is 2011 as well. Everything some kind of hand-coded strategy. I enjoyed it a lot.
RomanKornev 19 hours ago||
There is also MIT Battlecode - same idea, but for human teams

https://battlecode.org/

willmarch 1 day ago|
Pretty neat! I'm considering entering some models. How long will you be running these competitions?
codetiger 1 day ago|
The current season is a public beta and ends by end of the month. After that am considering 3 month seasons.
willmarch 1 day ago||
Signed up and submitted a test model. Now the real training begins!
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