Coder One (formerly the AI Sports Challenge) is an online AI programming competition for engineers, data scientists, researchers, students, and hobbyist programmers. The event is supported by our community partners SitePoint, General Assembly, Hackathons Australia, and the Data Science and AI Association of Australia (DSAi) (thank you!).

Whether this is your first time participating or you’re a return competitor from the AI Sports Challenge, here’s a summary to get you up to speed on what to expect at the upcoming competition.

Competition details

Starting 1 September 2022 (AEST), teams (between 1 — 5 members) from around the globe will program an AI player capable of competing in a multiplayer game. Participants will submit their code in the form of a Docker image to our servers, which will be played against submissions from other teams and ranked on a public leaderboard.

Top teams will be selected to head into the finals on 14 September 2022, where they’ll compete in an exciting head-to-head tournament livestreamed and casted on Twitch. Check out last year’s finale here.

If you’re interested in seeing what happened in previous seasons, check out our write-ups of the AI Sports Challenge 2021 and AI Sports Challenge 2020.

It’s free to create an account and access all the resources you need to develop your AI player. If you want to join the competitive leaderboard, you’ll need to purchase a $10 season pass which gives you unlimited submissions on our competition servers. If you represent an educational organisation (club, school or class, etc) or are unable to purchase the season pass but would still like to participate, please get in touch so we can organize special entry: humans@gocoder.one.

Prizes and giveaways

The top teams will share a total cash prize pool of $5,000 AUD. This is distributed as follows:

Top participants will also be invited to join our Talent Pool — a reverse job board where curated opportunities in AI and software engineering come to you.

Finally, all registered participants will receive a verifiable digital certificate as well as special giveaways and perks from our community partners SitePoint and General Assembly!

Who should join?

We welcome everyone from students to professionals in industry and academia. The event will be held online and in Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), but challengers from across the globe are encouraged to join.

It’s the place to be if you’ve ever:

• Wanted to improve your programming, machine learning, or algorithm skills
• Enjoyed hackathons or competitive programming competitions
• Wanted to live out your AlphaGo dreams

We’ll provide tutorials and getting started guides to walk you through building your first AI player. The competition is designed to be easy to get started, but you’ll have some tough competition if you want to make it to the finals.

The challenge

The competition will feature a game called Bomberland: a 2-player multi-agent game inspired by the classic console game, Bomberman. The goal is to program intelligent agents that compete in a 2D grid world, collecting powerups and placing explosives to takedown the opponent.

Starter kits will be provided in Python 3 and TypeScript. Other languages are available if you're able to implement the communication layer in your language of choice (this is fairly advanced, and contributions to starter kits are always welcome!). Check out our contribution guidelines.

The upcoming season will feature new game mechanics requiring new strategies. Previous seasons of Bomberland are available for reference on our open-source repo. Specifications for the new Bomberland season will be released at the start of the competition.

What’s next?

Following the competition, the environment will remain open-source and available for the rest of the season (end 2022).

If you’re interested in joining an exciting competition, improving your skills, and meeting a talented and creative community, create your account and register for the competition now!