algobattle-base 4.0.0

The Algobattle lab course package.

Algorithmic Battle

The lab course "Algorithmic Battle" is offered by the Computer Science Theory group of RWTH Aachen University since 2019. This repository contains the necessary code and documentation to set up the lab course yourself.

In an Algorithmic Battle, pairs of teams compete against one another in order to solve a problem of your choice, e.g. a problem from the class NP. The teams each design a generator, that outputs hard-to-solve instances for a given instance size, as well as a solver that accepts an instance and outputs a solution to it as quickly as possible.

The framework is written to be completely language-agnostic regarding the code of the generator and the solver, as each is wrapped in a docker container that only needs to adhere to an I/O structure of your choice (by default, in the form of json-files.)

If you are interested in how to use the framework for a lab course of your own, please consult our teaching concept.

Installation and Usage

This project is developed and tested on all major operating systems.

Please consult the official documentation for detailed instructions on installation and usage.

Related projects

This repository only includes the core framework for executing an Algorithmic Battle. For a selection of concrete problems that you can use to play around with the framework, have a look at the algobattle-problems repository. These are problems that have been posed to students in some form over the past years.

While the framework provides all essential tools to host a tournament yourself, e.g. in the form of a lab course, you may be interested in the algobattle-web project. The algobattle-web project implements a webframework with which you are able to comfortably manage your students teams and their code, your problem files and their documentation as well as schedule matches to be fought between registered student teams, using the algobattle API.

Contributing

We welcome any input on how to make this project accessible to as many people as possible. If you have feedback regarding the usage of the framework, the documentation or would even like to help us out with corrections, new features, or translations, feel free to open an issue or pull request. We have developed this project on the basis of practical experience inside our lab courses, thus some design elements may be unintuitive to you. Feel free to point out anything that appears odd to you.

Funding

The development of version 4.0.0 was funded by Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre (Project FRFMM-106/2022 Algobattle) and by the Department of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen University.