New prizes, new rules, and new Dockerfiles!
Hi folks!
Welcome to email #1 of the 2025 inaugural Unofficial Gleam Chess Bot Tournament Newsletter. Thanks for signing up - I hope one of you folks win ;)
We have a few updates today.
New Dockerfiles!
Thanks to @MoeDevelops on GitHub, we now have some updated Dockerfiles available in the repo that should be much smaller once built, saving you (and me!) some precious, precious hard drive space.
Along with this, the Gleam version for the competition has been bumped to 1.9.1, so you can use the new echo keyword for debugging, and JS-target users can enjoy non-byte-aligned bit arrays.
New rules!
There was a bit of a flaw in the rule regarding timeouts. @daniellionel01 on GitHub pointed out that you can abuse the timeout + retry to get up to 15s of processing time for your move.
To combat this, a new rule has been implemented whereby your bot will forfeit the match if it encounters more than 15 failures during the course of the match. Appreciate that some folks will have been doing this trick, but I’m not sitting and waiting for 15 seconds for every bot to make a move in a ~40 move game 😭
New prizes!
Finally, the tournament has its first official sponsor, CodeCrafters! They've kindly provided some excellent prizes for every prize tier. If you win, you and your team will get:
- 1st place: VIP CodeCrafters memberships for life
- 2nd place: 1 year CodeCrafters memberships
- 3rd place: 3 month CodeCrafters memberships
- Most interesting: 1 month CodeCrafters memberships
Be sure to thank them for their support by checking them out!
Of course, if you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email (I think that'll work?) or ping me on Discord. Links to everything are in the tournament repo.
Lots of love,
Isaac