AI Gaming India 2021
I and my team conducted an AI Gaming Tournament in collaboration with Microsoft and AI Gaming on 09th Jan 2021, for a duration of complete four hours. The event was focused on ‘Match Game’, and unlike normal games where we have to find two cards with the same image to make a match, here participants had to code a bot that can match up the tiles that contain the same ‘subject matter’. After the participants make some progress in developing their code, it is submitted to the event’s tournament to compete with other participants.
Game Objective:
We start with a set of tiles face down and you get to turn over two tiles at a time in order to match tiles in pairs, but, unlike the usual version of the matching game, our tiles are not strictly the same. We use Microsoft’s API to understand if the image on tile is a landmark , or an animal or a word, followed by finding another tile that also has that content on it.
I wanted to share this article with everyone who plans to conduct such an event in the near future, so that they can take away all the key points from our experience, and can prepare their ‘To-Do’ list for the event assuring the awesomeness of the tournament. In this article, I’ll be sharing about our preparation phase, must-have resources, and the final day of the event. Note: This event was virtual and hence the article is written with that perspective only.
So, let’s get started!
The first and foremost thing is: ‘try to organize this event in a team rather than going alone.’ This not only ensures the proper workforce but also brings in diversity and different perspectives which eventually helps you to organize a user-friendly workshop leading to more participants or let’s say, happy participants.
You can start the preparation by deciding the date and time of the event, followed by designing the posters and flyers for the event announcement. Don’t forget to take the AI Gaming Team into the loop from the beginning since they will help you the most and will guide you properly throughout the prep period. We also designed a website for the event since we had a great designer with us and were able to fetch a few sponsors like GitHub, 9Ledge Pro, and more as our team members had contacts to reach out to. These two things helped us to increase the registration count and make this event big. In this prep duration, make sure you ask for Azure student codes from Microsoft well in advance- like at least 10 days before your event date (because unfortunately we made this mistake and had to rush things at the last moment). You can also create a social media channel e.g. Discord to engage all the participants in one place. Keep sending reminders and tell about the benefits this event will provide. To make the event big, we also invited one of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals for a talk (Always an Inspiration!).
Must-have resources:
- SA Event Overview and Introduction Document: This will provide you step by step guide you need to follow
- AI Gaming Help Page access
- Event Management Controls
- Azure Codes for participants to access Azure Cognitive Services
On the day of the event, the session started with an introduction to the Azure platform and Microsoft Cognitive services, followed by a tutorial on creating accounts for Azure and AI Gaming platform. Further, explain about the AI Gaming platform and brief about code implementation part and ask participants to explore the rest from the AI Gaming Help page. Once done, reserve the maximum time for the participants to code their bot. The recommendation is to organize two tournaments namely:
- Test Tournament: 1 hour before the event ends, allowing participants to test their code and check the performance of their bot
- Final Tournament: 15 min before the event ends
Throughout the session, please be present to help the participants in case of any query, and keep sending reminders via mail asking people to submit their code as soon as possible in the first two hours. Share important resources like AI Gaming Help page videos by Stephen Graham (COO of AI Gaming), code optimization tips, etc.
To have your presence on social media, you can also create a hashtag for your event and ask all the participants to share images and experiences by sharing with your hashtag. Also, make sure you take the feedback from all the participants in the end which will help to improve next time. We also had some digital swags ready with us just to keep our audience excited and obviously, the prizes motivated more people to compete. During the tournaments, keep the running commentary to keep the spirits high and excitement at the next level. In the end, it completely depends on how you want winners to feel different from other participants. Maybe it can be a special certificate or some goodies in store.
Remember that your energy and excitement is more important than any prize or certificate. Below is the link of our event live-streamed on YouTube Channel:
Wishing you the best of luck for your events and keep rocking. #its_a_match
In the end, I would like to say, this has all been possible due to the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador program. Through this program, all of us have been motivated to learn more about the features that Azure Cloud provides, and have allowed us to share this knowledge with other students. By providing the resources to connect with like-minded individuals globally, the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador program has encouraged us to become a better engineer and learn from peoples’ experiences that we would never have been able to meet elsewhere.
