algobattle-base 4.0.0rc1

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.

The idea of the lab is to pose several, usually NP-complete problems during the semester.
Groups of students then write code that generates hard-to-solve instances for these problems and solvers that solve these problems quickly. In the default setting, the groups then battle against each other, generating instances of increasing size that the other group has to solve within a time limit.
Points are distributed relative to the biggest instance size for which a group was still able to solve an instance.

Installation

This project is being developed and tested on both Windows and Linux, MacOS support is being worked on but still is tentative.

python3 in version at least 3.10 and docker are required.

We recommend installing the package as a user using pip

pip install . --user

Adjust the parameters set in the algobattle/config.ini file to set which hardware resources you want to assign. You can pass alternative configuration files to the script using the --config_file option.

Usage

This repository does not include any practical problems. For a selection of problems that have been posed to students in practice, have a look at the algobattle-problems repository.

To start a basic run on a problem, using the solver and generator that are part of the problem directory, use

algobattle path/to/concrecte/problem/folder

The algobattle script offers several options, e.g. to give custom paths for solvers and generators. Run algobattle --help for all options.

Check the wiki for further documentation.