One week has passed since the announcement of the release of Autonomous Agents on the Obyte testnet. This also means there is only one week until the first round of winners in the Autonomous Agent Developer Contest will be found. Roughly $7,000 worth of prize money is up for grabs and since these are the early days of the contest, the odds of picking up one of the prizes are really good.

Everyone Start Equal

The language in which Autonomous Agents are written is called Oscript and it is a tailor made scripting language designed specifically for the purpose of defining Autonomous Agents.

Even though it may look familiar to JavaScript and SQL developers, Oscript is new to everyone. This also means that everyone starts at square one and will have to familiarize themselves with the language. The positive side effect is, that for the developer contest, everyone starts out equal. There is no chance of going head to head against someone with years of experience and plenty of completed projects on their resume.

The Oscript Editor

Since launch several significant improvements and additions have been made to the Oscript editor..

One of the latest updates allows you to save your work, edit several agents at the same time and easily switch between them. If you edit any predefined AA template, your personal copy is automatically created and saved.

This also makes it easier to develop use cases that require multiple Autonomous Agents to work together.

The editor offers everything you would expect from a modern editor. Syntax highlighting with tooltips and help, auto completion and the editor even has built-in code validation. In other words, a full fledged code editor ready for real world adoption.

But What To Build?

Taking a shot at winning one of the bi-weekly prizes is a no-brainer for most, but to do so an idea is required. Even with all the time in the world, without an idea for an Autonomous Agent it would lead nowhere. Coming up with an idea is never easy. It requires creativity, inspiration and a highly developed ability of abstract thinking.

More templates have been added during the past week making it easier to start from an already working example. For example, this is a new ICO template with milestone-based release of the raised funds.

Being able to identify a specific need and convert this into a solvable problem is one of the keys to idea generation. One way could be to think of a regular vending machine that gets triggered by an input (insertion of coins in the slot) and produces a predictable outcome (delivering an ice cold beverage or bag of chocolates) and convert this model into a problem that requires a solution.

The customer sees only input and output, but the designer of the machine has a far greater task to solve. Correctly identifying coins, making sure correct change can be returned, starting and stopping motors, keeping the chocolates at the right temperature and generally think of all the engineering aspects required to provide a smooth and easy purchasing process to the customer.

Another approach to idea generation is to get inspiration. This is made easy with the Oscript editor and its numerous ready-made templates. Simply start poking around in one of the templates, try to modify it to do something slightly different and gradually turn the template into your very own Autonomous Agent.

How About Complexity?

Your project won’t have to be super complex! It could be a simple project with a single purpose, simply to get better acquainted with the Oscript language. The barrier to entry is low and everyone has to take baby steps and learn how to crawl before they can walk. Remember that everyone starts out knowing nothing and have to build knowledge and familiarize with the language and the possibilities.

So what’s keeping you from entering? Head over to the Oscript editor, deploy your first Autonomous Agent and have a chance of winning one of the bi-weekly prizes. And don’t worry too much if your Agent doesn’t make the cut on your first submission. Projects that don’t win a prize can be further developed and entered in a later round. The contest runs until mid October, so there is plenty of time to experiment.