Seekers

• An artificial intelligence programming challenge targeted at students.
• AIs compete by controlling bouncy little circles ("seekers") trying to collect the most goals.
• Based on Python 3.9 and pygame.

This repository contains

• 🎮 A classic Python implementation of the Seekers game
• 🌐 A server and client implementation of the Seekers gRPC API

Players can join the Seekers Game in two ways:

1. as gRPC clients (new and safe way)
2. as a local file whose decide-function is called directly from within the game (old and unsafe way)
   • This is discouraged as it allows players to access the game's internals and cheat. See this issue.
   • useful for debugging/AI-developement

Getting started

Installation

• Python 3.9 or higher is required (make sure it's in your PATH)

1. Download the latest release and unpack it.
2. Install the packages in requirements.txt.
   • We recommend using a virtual environment (venv). Whenever opening a new terminal, you will have to activate the virtual environment again.
   • To create: python -m venv venv
   • To activate: source venv/bin/activate (Linux) or venv\Scripts\activate (Windows)

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

alternatively:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Depending on how you installed python, you might have to use py or python3 instead of python.

3. Done!

Create server and run clients

This will:

• start a Seekers Game
• run a gRPC server by default

python run_seekers.py <AI files>

Run one single client

⚠ You will need a separate server running. This can be the server above, or, for example, the Java implementation.

python run_client.py <AI file>

Development

Generating gRPC stubs

After cloning, you need to compile the gRPC stubs manually.

cd seekers/grpc
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
./compile_protos.sh

License

You can, and are invited to, use, redistribute and modify seekers under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 or (at your option) any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.