[tinco]

It sounds like a cool competition, but it would be nice if they gave a little more explanation about their technical solution. If it's true that the only way to test your bot is by uploading it to them and waiting for the CI to finish (once per day), then that's not very nice at all.

Will the participants get an environment in which they can test their bots outside of the competition CI?

[omahlama]

Servers are available for testing during development, running the code on your own computer - the CI server is useful in that it verifies that your code compiles and runs on the linux machine used during the competition.

[mcv]

I thought it was supposed to run on your own laptop during the competition?

[omahlama]

During the finals yes. The qualifying round is run with standardized virtual linux boxes, so all bots must have the same build and run scripts. With the amount of participants we're expecting, it wouldn't be possible to run the competitions manually.