I haven't tried this yet, but based on similar challenges I've participated I'm surprised by the fact that your bot moves by calling an http endpoint. Considering the 1 second move limit, I image it's difficult to time your moves right to guarantee that they arrive on time.

I feel the same, I have participated in aichallenge.org before and everything was run server-side, we had a 1 second move limit too, I have not run any starter yet to try it out but seems like using HTTP will have big issues with timing, I would prefer something that connects to a socket and keeps the connection up, would reduce some of the latency of establishing a connection.

Some people created a tcp server for the Ants one that allowed that: https://github.com/berak/ants-tcp I don't remember much of the details, since it was nearly 5 years ago, but it was an awesome thing to participate in.

Does the server not respect `Connection: keep-alive` ?

If you have an HTTP session with keep-alive, it works well enough. I played Vindinium for a while and only very seldom experienced timeouts unrelated to my code.

Also having the code run on players' computers means there's no way to stop cheating by having a human player providing some of the intelligence.

"When a player defeats a goblin, he becomes owner of the gold mine and receives one gold per turn. Furthermore, the goblin now defends the mine against other players."

Are we sure we are not the baddies? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

Going to write a simple bot when I'm home from work. Who else?

I will

How long is this going to run?

I have no idea

"You are welcome to run several instances of your bots at the same time, and more generally to use any measure you see fit to achieve leaderboard domination. Fight!"

Couldn't this be cheesed pretty easily by flooding them with bots working in tandem - pushing to have the highest scoring ones win when they're pitted against each other.

If it works the way I expect it to, I think all it would do is push the whole group of tandem bots down. The cheesing wouldn't make them score better against other user's bots.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to write a client to enable human players.

Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8183392

Try to play with the Ruby started, got 404