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"FinalBot" now supports F# as a language

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We all love programming competitions. The folk over at FinalBot are taking this one step further, for seriously competitive developers.

Welcome to FinalBot, a community for competitive software developers. ... FinalBot provides a set of competitions with rules and guidelines. Your job is to develop a bot—your player in this world—to compete on your behalf. Once you submit your bot, it’s automatically included in future tournaments. After each tournament is over you’ll have the opportunity to review your bot’s performance and decide if and how you want to refine its behavior... Our first competition—active right now—is our version of Texas Hold ‘Em Poker. ...

FinalBot is now supporting F# as a language. Ed Kaim has from FinalBot this to say:

We’re proud to support F# as a programming language for FinalBot competitions. For those who aren’t familiar with F#, it was originally designed by Don Syme and is an ongoing project by Microsoft Research. Officially, "F# is a succinct, expressive and efficient functional and object-oriented language for .NET which helps you write simple code to solve complex problems." It's also important to note that F# is available for virtually every major operating system.

For many scenarios, such as bot development, F# is an excellent choice because of its functional nature. This allows for concise and elegant code while still offering a lot of very practical constructs. If you haven’t yet considered F#, you can learn more at <www.fsharp.net>. We also plan on providing some videos and labs focusing on F# in the near future, so stay tuned.

When using F# for FinalBot, be sure to build your project using the --standalone flag (note the two dashes) so that it contains everything needed to execute in the official competition environment

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2011
    I made a great bot with F#, but I didn't get the basic Azure-environment to work... oh well...

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2011
    I work on FinalBot and just wanted to note that we are planning additional competitions and would appreciate feedback on what people would like to see. Hold 'Em was picked as the initial competition because it offers a very low barrier to entry in terms of API complexity, has a well-understood set of rules and documentation, and scales great for competition. We have a couple other competitions in development, but there's a lot of flexibility, so let us know.

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2011
    @Tuomas: We had mistakenly deployed the 2.0 version FSharp.Core.dll instead of the 4.0 version with the Hold 'Em tournament engine. A recent fix should have addressed this issue.