Noob Questions

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autox
Noob Questions

Hi,

I'm interested in participating and have a few basic questions I'm not seeing covered on your site.

What's the current status of Winter 2018 registration? The order page says it's sold out. Is that true, or will I be able to register at some point in the future?

What intellectual property rights do you maintain on the code you provide entrants, and the code entrants submit to participate? Am I free to use the race code outside of your events? Do I retain rights to any code I write for use in your events?

Thanks,
-Rene

Arron Churchill
Arron Churchill's picture
Formula Pi entry for Winter 2018

Hi Rene,

We have run out of YetiLids to send to Formula Pi competitors. We have ordered more and are currently waiting for delivery. We could allow you to purchase an entry and send the getting started information and code out to you, and send the YetiLid when they are in stock if you would like?

The license for the Formula Pi code is slightly unusual, but as a quick summary:

  • You are allowed to use the code provided for any personal use
  • You are not allowed to share the code provided with others unless they are part of your Formula Pi team or have their own entry
  • Any code you write remains your property
  • If your code is the winning entry you give us permission to share the code with everyone who has entered Formula Pi
autox
Code requirements

That all makes sense. Thanks for the clarifications. I just registered for notification on piborg for when the entry forms are available again.

Another question, regarding acceptable code. The rules state, "Formula Pi code must be well documented. Obscuring how the code works may be deemed not in the spirit of the competition, and may result in disqualification."

If I want to play around with generated code, or the output of Genetic Algorithms, it's possible the result will be hard to follow with no way to generate documentation. I could document the means by which it was produced, but not the code that actually runs. Similar for neural networks.

I trust this is all fair game even though it may be entirely opaque to a human trying to make sense of it?

Arron Churchill
Arron Churchill's picture
Code commenting

That would be absolutely fine, in fact we encourage teams to try different approaches to the challenge :)

You do not have to write lots of documentation or make a large quantity of comments in the code. All we ask is that there is enough information to point someone else looking at the code in the right direction if they wanted to do something similar.

From experience it is also worth adding some logging to help diagnose problems (such as the robot not starting), but it is not required.

autox
Race code access?

Hi,

I purchased an entry for the Winter 2018 season and received the confirmation email, but I haven't received any information about the event such as schedule, access to the repo or FTP.

How does this work?

Arron Churchill
Arron Churchill's picture
New entry

Hi,

Sorry about that, it looks like our system did not send the new registration emails out.
I have sent two emails to you explaining how to get access to the repository and your entry details.

autox
Repo access?

Hi,

I seem to have lost access to the Sourceforge repo. I was able to view source a few days ago, and the project shows up in my account, but if I try to access it I get a 403.

Can restore my access?

Arron Churchill
Arron Churchill's picture
Accessing the code

You still have access to the code :)

Unfortunately the permissions are a bit strange, you need to use the direct links to the code (as sent in one of the signup emails).

This link should work when you are logged in: https://sourceforge.net/p/formulapi/code/ci/monster/tree/

csunwc
Race Code on SourceForge

I sent in my registration info 4 days ago but I still could not access the race code. 403 error.
My account name on SourceForge is csunwc. Please advise.

Charles
Competitor 136

Arron Churchill
Arron Churchill's picture
Code access added

Hi Charles,

Sorry about the slow reply, I have been out of the office most of this week.

I have added you to the access list today. You should get an email with the correct links / commands to use to download the code :)

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