It is official!

Entelect Challenge 2023 Announcements
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Hello everyone! This the official welcome to Entelect Challenge 2023!

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out our awesome game trailer at The Entelect Challenge 2023 Cy-Fi - YouTube!

Our GitHub initial release can also be found here.

Eager to get started? Just some quick announcements!

This year, we’re shaking things up a little! The 2023 Entelect Challenge will be a bit different from the previous years.

There will only be 3 tournaments - 2 qualifying tournaments and the finals at Comic Con Africa. We will still have 8 Golden Tickets, and these will go to the top 4 participants in each of the qualifying tournaments. Additionally, after tournament 1, we will introduce one of our new initiatives - “Friendlies”.

“Friendlies” will be voluntary, friendly matches where participants can measure their bots against other players’ in a relaxed environment. The Friendlies are not compulsory, but will provide the opportunity to see how good your bot is when pitted against another player’s bot without counting towards any score. We will release more information closer to the first qualifier so keep an eye on the game rules section on the Entelect Forum and the GitHub repo.

Furthermore, the Entelect Challenge team wants to drive up community engagement this year. The team will be hosting a Build-A-Bot workshop during the year to introduce (or even broaden) the concept for anyone who might be interested in the topic. The aim is to make entering the main Entelect Challenge less daunting and to ultimately promote participation in the upcoming years. In addition to this, the Entelect Challenge will be hosting a community hackathon later in the year as well, similar to our IITPSA and University hackathons. The community hackathon will be a standalone, 1-day hackathon open to all South Africans. The aim will be to solve an optimization problem within the allotted time to win some prizes. You can find more information on the Entelect Challenge website at challenge.entelect.co.za.

For the Entelect Challenge University Cup, we will not only be hosting a single hackathon, but rather two hackathons over the course of the year. Both hackathons will be open to students registered at South African universities, although students will only be eligible to win one of the hackathons. Our first University Cup will be taking place as early as 27 May!

Keep an eye on the forum as we might be releasing some fixes, enhancement, starter bots and a shiny visualizer in the coming months!

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us, we’ll answer them as soon as possible!

Good luck and happy coding!

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Hi There,

I love the newer structure of 2 Qualifiers…

I think those last 2 events last year was a bit tight and put a bit of pressure on contestants.
Now I personally love the outcome of what that particular grind did to my ability to code.

I broke myself there for a moment.

Also thank you for Making Friendlies Voluntary.
I am not always a fan of Friendlies.

Its my own way of going about the challenge.
I always feel that a large part of the challenge is seeking your strategy. (Like how I killed off my own worms in 2017, or how I intentionally killed my own population earlier to better my curve last year)

And many of us are more than willing to share our strategies after the challenge is complete.
So there’s a lot of room for improvement once the challenge ends.

I just feel Friendlies go against the innovation part of the challenge.

I say this knowing full well that seeing a strategy and implementing it is two different things.
This is why I have always been against releasing competition logs.

But that’s me, and we all play the same rules.
So if there’s logs, Id use it, if not, then so be it…

Regarding the Hackathon, do you require to be at the actual venue to partake?
“The community hackathon will be a standalone, 1-day hackathon open to all South Africans”

You also mentioned:
Furthermore, the Entelect Challenge team wants to drive up community engagement this year.

My Fiance said that she will try and partake this year.
So I am making a public video essentially aimed at
“How do i look at the Entelect Challenge. How do I get started etc”

The reason for the video is because I believe in fairness.
The Video does not handle strategy or anything like that. Its merely aimed as a “how to get started” type of video.

And my rules are that I cannot help with strategy or implementation.
Though I do encourage chatting on these forums if there’s ever a need.

I mention this because I have incentive and a request to have that video up.
I will do 2 videos. The first being “my unboxing of the challenge”, which essentially handles how I prepare my environment.

The second is just my first look at the challenge itself.
But It also means Im not looking at anything before I actually make the video itself.

Think its more honest that way.
If this could be leveraged towards:
Furthermore, the Entelect Challenge team wants to drive up community engagement this year.

Then that can surely be actioned.
I will send a video this weekend (As long as everything works for me)

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Looking forward to watching your videos :blue_heart::green_heart: @WillieTheron

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I will draw them together for sure.

I was just holding off for some bugs and had a very crazy, the good kind, month.

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Hm. two months late to the party…

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