CodinGame

I have never been interested in competitive programming or AI in the past. I tried and I thought there was nothing in it for me. Maybe it was because my previous experiences were not fun enough compared to the complexity of tasks to solve, the knowledge I needed to acquire and the time invested. Thus for years, I have not given much thought to it.

A colleague of mine introduced me to the CodinGame platform. I decided to give it a shot in march 2020 and was completely hooked. I believe that the gamification of programming challenges, competitive programming, and game AI helped me to get, and stay, motivated.

In this article, I will introduce the different activities you can do on the platform and how they improve your developer skills.

1. What can you do on CodinGame?

There are different kinds of activities on CodinGame:

• puzzles, where you have to solve a task without competition or any constrain
• contests, a time-limited competition which is either a bot programming contest (you program a bot that will fight other bots, the more players you beat, the higher rank you will obtain) or an optimization (you do not play directly against opponents, players are ranked on the highest score they obtained)
• optimization and bot programming, which are the same as optimization contests and bot programming contests except you could join them anytime and they never end
• code golf, where you solve tasks and you are ranked on the code size of your solution
• clash of code, where you compete against some players for less than 15 minutes, your ranking will be either based on the time you took to solve a task or the code size of your solution

As of today, the 25th of December 2020, I am in the top 0.1% in the global ranking (2% for contests, 0.3% for bot programming, 4% for clash of code, 2% for optimization, and 0.3% for code golf). I know that there is a lot of room for improvement, but still, I am very proud of such a ranking 😂. You can check my profile to see my current ranking.

For all these activities, you get your data in the standard input stream and you give your answer in the standard output stream. There are plenty of programming languages available, but I focus mostly on C, C++, and python. The code is compiled and executed on the platform, so for example you cannot pass compiler options for C and C++ solutions. There is a code size limit, a RAM consumption limit, and a response time limit (time between the moment your receive your input and the moment you send your answer). These limitations force you to carefully think of a solution instead of brute-forcing. Some optimization tasks can be run on your computer, but even then, brute-forcing will not give you a high score any time soon 😄.

CodinGame also proposes other activities to companies, for sourcing, screening, and retaining. I will not get into those activities as there is not much I could say about it.

2. Training and learning with puzzles

Puzzles on CodinGame help you to discover and master some new algorithms or techniques. Generally, you can reuse what you have learned on puzzles in bot programming or optimization. This is how I learned Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), a heuristic search algorithm that I later reused in bot programming for board games. You can read more about this technique with the MCTS bot I wrote for Langton's Ant.

To solve a puzzle, you have to code a solution that passes some test cases on the platform. To prevent hardcoding, the validation test cases are hidden and you test your solution in the IDE on a different set of test cases. If your solution does not pass all the validation test cases, their names can help you to find what you have missed. Some tests will force you to think about edge cases, others will force you to design an efficient algorithm to respect the response time limit. I find it quite gratifying when all the validation test passes, this feels like I have learned new tricks or successfully applied some I already knew. After a while, I noticed that I design solutions more easily, either for my work or puzzles on CodinGame.

I think that the test cases in CodinGame made me write more tests in my work. When I make a supposition about the way the code should behave, I add a test case for that. When I code some edge cases that happen very seldom, I add some test cases for each of these situations. I believe that CodinGame made me experience the confidence you can get in your code once you have a test suit. Also, by looking at the test case in the platform, I get more and more familiar with how you can simply test a behavior.

I have learned, quite the hard way, that it is better to write only the minimum amount of code to solve a task. Solving puzzles is a good opportunity to practice this kind of code minimalism. Indeed, you have a code that is written by only one person, for only one task, without any change in the requirements or the constraints. Thus, you have no excuse to have dead code, superfluous abstraction, unused field/variable, and so on.

3. Bot programming

For bot programming, you code a program that will send the actions to perform each turns for a player in a multiplayer game. Once you submit your program, it will enter the arena, where it will fight other players' programs. The arena is divided into leagues: Wood, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Legend. The wood league is subdivided into more leagues, each one introduces a new rule for the game. The first time you submit your program, it enters the first wood league. During the submission, your program is matched against opponents to compute its ranking according to a TrueSkill system. When the program rank is above the one of the league's boss, it is promoted to the next league. After promotion, the program always enters the latest reached league on submission.

Here, learning new algorithms or techniques does not suffice, you have to use them better than other players. This task, being better than thousands of players, can appear overwhelming. Indeed, there are so many possibilities to explore to improve the bot, so many variables to optimize. You have to prioritize improvements based on their return on investment: do first what will likely improve your ranking a lot. And once you try an improvement, make sure to test it correctly and intensively (e.g. when you submit, you do not have a lot of games played with the new version of the program, so you might need to submit it multiple time or to build a local arena to have enough sample games). Also, make sure that there is no bug in your program as it is likely to cause you a lot of defeats. By doing such prioritization and testing, there is a high probability that you will reach the silver league of any game 🙂.

For some games, you have to evaluate a game configuration to quantify how likely you are going to win from this configuration. This requires some thinking about the game to reduce a complete game configuration to a number. Once you have done that, the bot logic is similar to a search algorithm that tries to find the maximum evaluation of the game configuration space. For other games, you have to simulate many games per turn to choose the most promising move. In such a situation, the bot that makes the most simulation per turn is likely to win the battle. Thus, you have to optimize your program to outperform your opponents (looking for algorithms with lower complexities, using profilers to find hotspots, using SIMD to optimize hotspots, etc...).

I have noticed that tooling helped me a lot to improve my ranking in bot programming. For example, I wrote arenas to let the different versions of my program compete against each other and have thousands of games played under 10s of execution. I also wrote GUI to replay matches between my versions and display analysis information to understand what a bot missed. Thanks to some posts in the forum, I found a way to fetch lost games in the online arena. I was then able to parse the data and build a graphical analysis of my defeat to find improvements or bugs. Finally, as the CodinGame platform requires a single source file, I have a script automatically called during the build process that assembles my bot source code from multiple files. I find it easier to develop with multiple source files, to separate concepts and responsibilities.

4. Optimization

Optimization games could be seen as implementing a search algorithm that finds the path to a game state with the highest score. For example, it could be to safely land a shuttle on Mars (Mars Lander) while minimizing the quantity of fuel used (each test case have a different landscape, different initial velocities, and different landing area). Another example is to reach the highest score in a 2048 game.

The search space for these games is too big to find an optimal solution in the allotted time. You have to rely on heuristics to find an acceptable but maybe not optimal solution. This focus on heuristics is something I enjoy in optimization games; you have to find shortcuts to provide an acceptable answer. It is not an easy task but once you mastered the design of heuristics, you can apply the skill to other problems. I must admit that I'm still far from mastering, however, I am improving nonetheless 😝.

I also like to optimize performance on optimization games. As the game state space is so big, increasing the search speed can improve a lot the final result. Thus, optimization games promote the practice of profiling, bottleneck identification, and performance optimization.

5. Contests

A contest is either a new optimization game or a new bot programming game, meaning there are no players in the arena before the start date. For a bot programming game, initially, only the wood leagues are opened, higher leagues will open at later dates. When a new league opens, a bot is chosen as the league's boss and every bot higher ranked than the boss is automatically promoted to the higher league. The boss is chosen by CodinGame's staff to promote only a fraction of bots and not overcrowd the new league. Other bots need to be improved and resubmitted to finish with a ranking higher than the boss after all submission matches.

The two specificities of a contest compared to an optimization game or a bot programming game are that you are limited in time and no working strategies are known. Since there is a deadline, you have to find clever ways to climb in the ranking before the contest ends. Also, because the game is new, there are no proven strategies available somewhere, you have to find your solution from scratch. I find the situation similar to when you have to build a working demo of new features. In my opinion, contests are a nice way to train for such situations with much fewer consequences in your professional life 😄.

I believe contests are evaluations of my current level. Due to the limited time, my final ranking cannot be improved by spending more time developing a solution. I have as much time as any other participants. Thus I consider that my ranking reflects the following:

• the quantity of knowledge I acquired
• how well I prioritized my tasks
• how well I tested my modifications
• how well I optimized the performances of my program
• the quality of my evaluation functions
• the quality of my solution design
• the quality of my heuristics

When I started on CodinGame, there was a contest called Ocean of Code. I was overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of the task to solve and astonished by the skills of other participants. I did not submit any program to the arena and was not ranked. Then, there was the Spring Challenge 2020. I ended ranked 672 out of 4 955, at the top of the silver league. For the second half of the contest, I could not progress anymore, unable to find how to coordinate multiple agents and how to tackle the fog of war. Six months later, there was the Fall Challenge 2020. I finished ranked 271 out of 7 011, around the middle of the gold league. For this contest, I was limited by my capacity to design a better evaluation function. I believe this is a great improvement, knowing that I spent much less time on this contest than on the previous one (I was on holidays for the Spring Challenge 2020, during lockdown so without many other things to do 😄).

6. Golf

Code golf is not something you must perform in a professional environment! However, in a competitive environment, it helps you to improve your knowledge of the programming language you use. To decrease the character count of your solution, you have to rely on every dirty trick of the language and the compiler, even those that are not documented.

Often, you might rely on hardcoding to simplify your solution. Since you have a limited set of validation test cases, you can try to guess what are those tests. Then, you code a solution valid only for those tests, scrapping every part of the source code that is never reached by any of those tests. It can be seen as an extreme case of YAGNI. I am not sure it is useful in a professional environment 🤔.

In my own experience, I had to find creative ways to do things to reduce the code size. I had to think hard about how I could use the same memory address for multiple purposes, rely on the random value of uninitialized variables, and other secret tips. In a way, it is a kind of brain teaser.

7. Clash of Code (COC)

COCs are like solving simple puzzles in competition with other people. I am not very fond of this activity as I do not see how I am improving as a developer by doing COCs. However, I did some to prepare myself for technical interviews. In such an interview you are typically asked to solve tasks and you have to do better and faster than others to be offered a job.

COCs also taught me to handle failure. In my first COCs, I finished first quite easily and was very proud of myself. Then, sometimes, I finished last for some COC, unable to solve a task, which was very simple. I understood that you cannot always have immediately the right answer and that is perfectly fine. It helped me to keep focused during technical interviews after I failed to find an answer.

Conclusion

I recommend to anybody interested in Game AI, competitive programming, or improving their developer skills to give the CodinGame platform a try. There are many activities you could try at your own pace. A recent quest system can even help you to find your way through the platform. An online chat and a discord server are also available, in case you require some directions to choose a beginner-friendly activity or need some assistance on a puzzle/optimization game/bot programming game.

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