cs404x is a remote arena for agents of the CS404 Agent Based System module at the University of Warwick. It includes a client and a server, and aims for full compatibility with the "local" bots.

It is by no means production-ready, there are things that could definitely be improved, but it was setup so that students can quickly test different strategies against each other without having to share code, avoiding plagiarism concerns.

# (Recommended) with pipx
pipx install git+https://github.com/tomasff/cs404x.git

# With pip
pip install --user git+https://github.com/tomasff/cs404x.git

Arenas act as a single remote auction over websockets, and can be setup as follows,

cs404x-server --address 0.0.0.0 --port 4040

You'll need a bot as specified in the coursework specification,

class Bot:
    def __init__(self):
        self.name = "flat_bot_10"

    def get_bid(
        self,
        current_round,
        bots,
        winner_pays,
        artists_and_values,
        round_limit,
        starting_budget,
        painting_order,
        target_collection,
        my_bot_details,
        current_painting,
        winner_ids,
        amounts_paid,
    ):
        return 10

You can then connect to an arena,

cs404x-client --username your_display_name \
    --address 127.0.0.1 \
    --port 4040 \
    --bot path/to/your/bot.py \
    --telemetry-base telemetry/ \
    --num-auctions 20

The Auctioneer code takes inspiration from the Auctioneer provided in the CS404 module:

The (original) code was developed by Charlie Pilgrim, Department of Mathematics, University of Warwick. A previous version of the coursework, from which this takes inspiration, was written by Alexander Carver, Department of Computing, Imperial College London. Further precious input for the coursework came from Charlotte Roman, Department of Mathematics, University of Warwick.

This software is inspired by another remote arena, Cerutti.