botbox

README

Bot Box

Bot Box is a customizable server meant for battling AIs against each other. It comes in multiple parts:

• A sandboxed game server with scheduler that plays bots against each other by communicating via websockets.
• A framework for creating game rules and constraints to be played by bots in real-time or alternating turns.
• SDKs for a number of languages to write bots.
• A web visualizer for watching games (games will need a view component) and tracking high scores.

Progress

Currently the following is implemented and working:

• Example Tron game and websocket server with a Python client SDK.
• Sandbox service which spawns isolated Docker containers and plays games started via an HTTP API.
• Database container with empty PostgreSQL database
• Account creation / login

Remaining work:

• Finish the web API
• Finish web interface
• Create a scheduler service for matchmaking
• Continuous deployment and upgrade scripts

Usage

Right now from games/tron/server you can run

go run main.go --ids "1 2" --secrets "s1 s2"

This starts the Tron server and waits for clients.

Install the Tron SDK from games/tron/sdk/python using python setup.py develop

Then write a simple Tron agent, e.g.:

import botbox_tron
import random

def move(p, actions, state):
    """A trivial agent that randomly picks an action."""

    # find moves that are safe to make
    safe = botbox_tron.safe_moves(p, state)
    # find the intersection of valid and safe moves
    actions = [a for a in actions if a in safe]

    if actions:
        # pick a valid, safe action
        return random.choice(actions)
    else:
        # can't do anything
        return

# Start the agent with our simple move function
botbox_tron.start(move)

and run two instances of it to watch them play each other!

Deploying

Right now there is a simple ./deploy.sh script you can run to start up the docker containers.

Environment variables

You must create an env.sh script to correctly start the Botbox services.

$ cp env.sample.sh env.sh
$ vim env.sh

To deploy all services on one box:

$ ./deploy.sh

If you make changes to a single service, you can deploy only that service to save time:

$ ./deploy.sh api

$ ./deploy.sh database

$ ./deploy.sh web

$ ./deploy.sh nginx

To delete the database and create an empty one:

$ ./deploy.sh database new

Visit http://localhost to see the web interface.

Currently the deployment script starts Docker containers only on the current machine, but future updates will allow deploying services on multiple machines connected to the same network.