Rules, instructions and starter kits

Take part of the technical specification, rules and starter kits for Considition 2022.

Available maps

The training maps are available from November 1st. During the final night on November 8th from 6:30 PM (GMT+1), the four final maps will be made available every 30 minutes.

  • Training Map #1: map_name = Suburbia
  • Training Map #2: map_name = Fancyville
  • map_name = Farmville
  • map_name = Mountana
  • map_name = Pleasantville
  • map_name = Sky Scrape City

Links

Visualizer
Achievements
Starter kits

FAQ

  • What happens if the customer doesn’t get the minimum refund amount they require? 
    They will destroy the bag and it is removed from the game. You will also get a negative customer score.
  • What happens if you don’t have enough money to hand out a refund? 
    If the customer went to refund in the store, same as above. If the customer left the bag outside their door on the 7th day then they don’t have a reason to destroy them, the truck takes care of the bags. 
  • When does the truck arrive weekly to pick bags outside customers door? 
    Every 7th day. 
  • Why do customers go to the store instead of waiting for the truck to pick up the used bags?
    The reason is that they have a max limit as to how much trash they tolerate to keep at home. On the customers downside they only get up to 80% of the set refund.
  • What’s the best way to contact you if I have any other questions?
    The best way is to send us a message on Slack!

The rules

The theme for Considition 2022 is resusable bags for the everyday grocery shopping, primarily online. 

You will be in charge of providing the best availability of bags during a year to keep your civilization happy while also aiming to reduce pollution from production and transport routes. To make sure the bags are returned you have promised the customers that they will be either refunded for returning used bags or charged for holding onto them. 

Your company has also been restricted with a budget to stay keep spending down. If you fail to keep bags available to your customers they will show their dissatisfaction. Though bags take a long process from being used, then be washed and at last be available again to the customers. Bags don’t live forever, and you will find out that new bags have to be produced when others become beyond recycling or disposed. 

CO2 & Customer Satisfaction

Your customers are also greedy. The customers don’t want to waste too much money but may also want a refund in return, if you allow them. This can also affect their satisfaction. 

Your task is to try out different bag types and find an algorithm that makes the best use of them in a circular flow. The scoring of your algorithm will be based on two criterias: 
– Customer Score: How many times you have satisfied customers over the year. 
– CO2 Score: How much pollution in total you have generated from production and trucks.

Total Score = Customer Score – CO2 Score. 

But if you run out of money you will of course suffer from production stop. 

Can you find the optimal bag type along with a balance of production speed and 
environmental consideration?

Learn more about the score further down this page.

Achievements

During the period November 1st 00:01 AM until November 8th 8:30 PM, you will be able to collect achievements. Below, you can read more about the 24 achievements that are possible to collect. The five teams that are best at collecting achievements are awarded. Learn more about the prizes here.

Time schedule

The training session starts November 1st. Here you will be provided with StarterKits and access  to the training maps. Although not necessary, these kits will enable you to quickly entrench yourself in the hackathon. By means of your own or through the StarterKits you can then develop and improve your algorithm by testing it against these training maps. 

Note that the training maps only cover a single month each while the final hackathon day features maps that span over a full year for each map. During the training session the achievement table will also be accessible. Through this you can track your progression and hunt for the goal of unlocking the highest number of achievements. 

On November 8th the real hackathon commences. At 6:30 PM (GMT+1) the first competition map is released. Following this, one additional map will be made available every 30 minutes. The maps won’t close when the next one opens. Hence, it is possible to improve your score on all four maps all the way until they all close at 8:30 PM. It’s your team’s total score that matters in the end. I.e., the team with the highest total score on the four maps summarized wins Considition 2022.

At about 8:40 PM, the four best teams’ scores will be shown in the stream and we will determine the winners of the hackathon. Best of luck! 

Image from one of our physical hackathon venues, with the live stream on screen.

Maps

As mentioned above, six different maps will be released throughout the hackathon. These maps will feature different sizes of population but also different consumer behavior. Some days during the year may also affect the demand. 

Farmville: Few people live here but they are eager to try out your new product

Mountana: An ordinary town with a mountain. People here seems to pile up on bags but treat them poorly. 

Pleasantville: The people who have moved here seek a comfortable life where everything should be available all the time and seem more sensitive.

Sky Scrape City: The final scenario. Lots of potential customers but also more to satisfy. These big city people are greedy and always look for a profit. Can you handle the pressure? The top four will get highlighted during the live show but everyone can still compete. The competition is not over yet.

Training maps 1 & 2: One ordinary town during March and one during August. Nothing out of the ordinary… Or?

Grocery deliveries, food store/circularity hub, laundry and e-commerce storage explained.

Customer score

The number of satisfied customers is awarded each time a customer either: 

  • Receives a bag that they are looking for, and the bag meets their price requirement. 
  • Gets refunded for recycling their bag. 

The number of satisfied customers is deduced each time a customer either:

  • Doesn’t receive a bag that they are looking for or the bag was too expensive. 
  • They didn’t get as much refund as they were hoping for (this will also result in them destroying the bag completely). 

CO2 Score

Whenever a delivery truck is on the road it spews pollution in the form of CO2. We don’t want to contribute to that. 

Each bag has a weight that adds to the truck weight meaning that more pollution is made. Depending on what bag type is chosen the material will affect the weight. 

Also, whenever a bag is produced the factory will add to that CO2. That is why we prefer to reuse the final product as many times as possible! 

Recycling

Customers will use bags in an unknown way, depending on how rude they treat their bags and how much they shop in their daily life. Once customers are done with their bag they will store it in front of their house. 

Every 7th day trucks will pick up these dirty bags and bring them back to a recycling center where it will spend some days to make them reusable. The customer will then get a full refund for each bag picked up. In this case the customer does not care about the amount of refund they get, but if the company got no finances they will give a negative customer score. 

If the customer have too many used bags at home they will take to action and recycle them by themselves in a nearby grocery store. The customer may then get 80% of the full refund depending on the choice you made regarding how the refund is handled. See below.

Refunded – or not

There are two options for you to make whether your solutions should apply a refund or a penalty: 

1. RECYLE_REFUND (recycleRefundChoice = true): 
If the customer takes more than one week to consume a bag then the refund will slowly decrease over time by 1 SEK/day. Then, if the value of the bag has decreased below the customer expectations then they will destroy the bag in anger! They will also react poorly. 

2. PENALTY (recycleRefundChoice = false): 
If the customer takes more than two weeks to consume a bag then your company will send a penalty of 50 SEK to that person for holding the bag for too long, hindering others from using it. The customer will in this case also destroy the bag in anger! They will also react poorly. 

Bag types

Part of the solution is to find the most efficient bag for your flow. These bags are made from different materials that affects production cost, pollution from manufacturing, increase in truck weight (which gives even more pollution), how many times they can be reused and how long time it takes for it to be recycled. 

For example a plastic bag can be recycled many times but needs several days to be recycled or requires high order costs. While a paper bag may only last a day before it is not recyclable but is cheap to produce. 

Playing the game

The game is played using a REST-API. First you must get the information of a map by calling /mapInfo and specifying a map name, for example /mapInfo?MapName=training1. A map contains three things: the population, the company budget and a description of the customer behavior.

Once you know the population and the behavior of it is up to you and your algorithm to find a solution and to submit it to be validated and evaluated using /submit. Again, you must specify which map /submit?MapName=training1. 

This is how the final score is calculated: 
score = customer score – CO2 score

To help you get to playing the game as quickly as possible, there exists four StarterKits you can use to get started. The StarterKits contain an easy way to communicate the API as well as a simple algorithm that can provide you with a solution to the training maps (however, you’ll have to improve the algorithm or create your own to be able to solve the competition maps and increase the efficiency). We have provided starter kits for Java, JavaScript, Python and C# at these links. You can, of course, also use any other programming language of your choice. 

You can submit however many solutions you want for each map. You can go to the Highscore page to view each teams best score. If you want to view a visualization of your solution, go to the Visualizer and paste your game ID and your API key.

During the competition, the names of the available maps will be revealed on this page. In total there will be 4 maps to compete on, so make sure to get a few games on each of the maps to maximize your chances of winning. To prepare for the competition there will be a training period before the competition starts on 11/8/2022, 6:30:00 PM. The training period starts on 11/1/2022, 00:00:01 AM and gives you access to 2 maps to help you develop your Artificial Intelligence.

A more thorough description of the API can be found below. Good luck! 

API

You can use any programming language you want to communicate with the API, but remember that there are a couple of StarterKits to help you get going. When registering for the competition you will have received an API key that has to be set as ‘x-api-key’ in the header of any request you do to the API or in the StarterKit. If you have lost your API key, go to the Teams page and click your card to recover the key. 

The base path for the API is api.considition.com/api/game and it can be explored on the Swagger page. The API contains the following endpoints: 

GET

/api/game/mapInfo - Returns information about a map. You must specify a map name.
Parameter: ?MapName=
Response:
{
"population": 10,
"companyBudget": 1000,
"behavior": "Easy"
}  

POST

/api/game/submit - Submit a solution for a specific map and receive a score. You must specify a map name.
Parameter:
Request:
{
"orders":
[0,0,0,10070,42790,43242,16103,27564,23314,8430,18343,18479,49997,2274,37111,9563,36340,44582,28886,34065,35154,28404,22739,9749,40028,32297,17558,5618,8427,19990,43199,48482,21164,19142,3045,613,3352,24621,41907,19582,22284,19211,33522,11355,1210,23336,34122,29451,4800,11286,41933,44348,48647,478,18863,38809,22325,10548,34890,7643,11314,18727,24481,41530,32862,32368,48158,14627,10419,30850,11921,11701,16516,4538,43820,34515,9926,36595,16574,12141,10610,31436,41890,49421,27679,5370,33726,29235,16590,35936,36580,6978,26206,12218,25604,42658,15422,40766,29983,43689,29259,25068,9615,6776,38091,9701,48474,48956,32080,16294,41843,40858,32959,25580,13089,20735,25785,17237,23323,37913,33146,9811,32017,15861,39258,27704,14902,16469,1158,19757,44793,10447,45603,4744,46492,17814,35962,41711,28799,33098,19532,6860,29205,45620,18388,8231,32777,36024,25373,7510,47467,1598,28341,47504,8170,23383,27919,7578,10031,27539,42458,35946,18755,30298,36261,40974,47388,23064,8993,31315,2843,470,43776,48334,45568,32825,6759,11526,31,30302,47873,27866,4148,2783,9802,29819,25207,10670,15883,28104,38695,30646,17290,16022,43902,31614,33042,48863,40843,18201,17024,12735,18582,38814,30239,7463,2322,28853,18190,41531,29731,4653,9906,27290,22448,5120,38882,46854,16779,27495,10197,953,9838,27156,6723,1254,48248,26055,49744,37274,21087,7695,10698,18034,16999,6167,9024,4967,25613,13965,20358,32426,47607,44782,19549,17002,34547,37793,25252,15731,39848,26541,32004,15488,6018,8764,36635,25915,33131,12315,13736,23047,829,13488,11836,6376,4461,36485,16126,31355,21476,27524,25584,13429,33018,42433,31902,42453,41374,32823,39617,15293,24733,546,18612,12810,905,22666,33955,34726,36654,20945,22227,48612,26121,13538,35856,10363,30160,43080,33723,21318,39163,45761,0,2761,43779,6796,46892,12509,34589,816,14130,22313,47582,12765,18575,30005,34167,15546,27178,27414,2130,3574,18268,24967,36867,47360,22546,24,43422,5872,36087,25201,39943,37543,5507,42584,34359,25836,7969,31181,48888,45139,26501,35509,47451,11130,44814,16827,43856,27212,48999,25548,43460,42585,48848,0,0,35700,44689,42393,45391,33991,39707],
"recycleRefundChoice": true,
"bagPrice": 10,
"refundAmount": 2,
"bagType": 1,
“mapname”: “Suburbia”
}
Response:
{
"gameId": 10,
"total_score": 200,
"weekly": {
“co2”: 100,
“positive_customer_score”: 400,
“negative_customer_score”: 100,
“budget”: 0
}
"total_produced_bags": 1000,
"total_destroyed_bags": 5,
"link": "Link to visualization of game: https://visualizer.considition.com?gameId=12345689"
}