 I've been muted the whole time. Hello, everyone. I have a hardware mute button. Perfect. No, it's just the day it is. Anyway, hello, everyone. Welcome to the Battle Snake Cubecon Cup. My name is Joe and I'm joined by my fabulous co-host, Aurora. How are you doing today? I am well, Joe. And I better know that I realize that I can hear you and that, you know, it's not a completely crazy day. No, you can. I just have too many mute buttons and all of them are on. Every single one of them is on. Anyway, this is the cubecon cup. If you are not familiar with Battle Snake, we are going to tell you all about that. Do not worry, but this is a very special event for us. We're very excited to be able to be hanging out with all of you. I hope you've been having a wonderful cubecon. I know it's been going for a couple of days. My Twitter feed has been full with Coopers having a good time. I feel like everyone I follow on Twitter is like giving a talk or attending a talk. It's it's very exciting. Such a great big conference and a delight that we get to be a part of it. Absolutely. It's a little bit scary being on the cloud native channels. Anyway, what is Battle Snake? Let me tell you all about Battle Snake. Prepare to have your life changed now that you're going to know about Battle Snake. I hope you all don't like free time. It's very addictive. So, Battle Snake is a programming game where you create APIs that effectively respond to a game of snake. So, you set up a little web server that you then enter into the game and that web server represents your snake and then your snake gets put into games. It gets API requests that represent the state of the game and you return the move for your snake. That sounds a bit abstract. Let's jump into a game and demonstrate and I'm going to demonstrate with some of the snakes which are competing in this very here cubecon cup because you're here to watch the finals. These snakes battled it out on Monday in an exhibition where it was just like a little bit of a friendly game. They spent three hours in a tutorial with you and Brad, right? That is correct. Awesome. So, Monday, folks gathered, learned about Battle Snake, built their first snakes and then we kicked off a little tournament and this one, the games in that tournament. It was a great showing. I've actually not restarted this game. There we go. It was a great show. What's going on here? Let me rewrite that. There we go. It was a really fantastic showing. Everyone did great considering, you know, they'd been playing for me hours. So, let's jump into this game and show you what it's all about. So, on this board, you will see four snakes and you will also see a lot of pumpkin spice lattes. These are the food of choice for battle snakes right now. Exactly. Exactly. These are the foods. If you are not familiar with the game of snake, basically, you have snakes on a board, a little 2D board and the snakes, whenever they eat food, grow in size and you are eliminated by hitting the wall, by starving out, by not eating enough food, or by colliding with the body of a snake, could be your snake or another snake, or by colliding with the head of a bigger snake. So, what you're seeing here is four snakes. We've got He, Him, His on the right, Pasovedo in the bottom right, Sandeep's KubeCon Battle Snake in the top middle and Snake Tilt, Tilt, Tilt, Tilt in the bottom left. And this is some information we have about the game and the state of the game. So, right now, we're on turn zero. This game has not started. And we have these little numbers down the side. Each of these numbers represents the length of that snake. So, each of these snakes have three segments right now, the head, the body, and the tail. You can't see those other two segments because the snakes haven't started, so they're coiled up and ready to go. And then this bar is their health bar. It starts at 100, and every turn it will tick down by one. And to refill that bar, they need to eat a food. And when they eat a food, their length will increase by one. So, does everyone get the rules so far? Everyone understand that part of it? Because now I'm going to hit play, and that's where the fun begins. So, are you ready? Question in chat here is like, do you use AI for the snakes? And like, yes, and everything in between. So, each of these battle snakes is built by an individual developer in a programming language of their choice, hosted on a platform of their choice. So, long as it responds and implements the Battle Snake REST API correctly, you can interact and play a game of Battle Snake. And how folks build their Battle Snake is up to them. Rule-based snakes, sort of like a whole stack of developed statements for conditions, is a surprisingly effective strategy. But there are folks out there doing heavy machine learning and AI-based snakes. We've seen neural networks at play. We've seen, you know, hosts of tree pruning strategies for trying to do rule advancement. There are research papers out there on the topic of Battle Snake. So, really, it's a huge open book for how a developer can approach this problem and interact with it and build and grow. And practice their programming skills in a really fun, exciting project. Yeah, absolutely. And the range of... To give an example of how ridiculous the range of things get, you know, we get the... Aurora is saying you can build it in anything. Use any infrastructure, any programming language. We had a live stream a couple of weeks ago where someone built a Battle Snake entirely in raw bash. They built a web server in bash and played the game in bash. We have some kind of meme snakes using face control like computer vision guided by the position of people on webcams. It's... You can do... As long as you return moves, you can do the sky is the limit. And we'll dive into... I think we'll look at some bracket... Not brackets. We'll look at one of the arenas in a minute and show the range of strategies that are at play. But this being just a couple of hours that these people built these snakes, in this game, they've had a whole week to iterate on them since. But in this game, as you were saying, probably mostly, you know, if statements going on here, right? Pretty fair to say. Yeah. Some fresh baby snakes, freshly hatched? Freshly hatched. I don't know. Some freshly hatched if statements. Yeah. So, I press... Ah, I hit space. God, this is going well. Okay, let's kick this game off. I've done this before. I put my hand down too heavy on the spacebar. There we go. So, this is a full speed game. We will be watching games of Tad Slower today. Well, I wanted to get through this so you can see it. So, as you can see, the snakes are moving around. They're grabbing food. As they're grabbing food, they're getting bigger. You've got snakes spiraling in the corner for a little bit for some safety before they need to go and hunt for that food. Pasovedo, you can see that health bar got real low, like as snakes is right now. It'll get low and then it'll go on the hunt for some food. Or it got gobbled up by Pasovedo. And that is the life cycle of a battle snake. And here, we saw a great thing that we're going to see. Time and again today, you get long. You eat lots of food. You worm your way into a corner and goodbye snake. So, there's lots of fun things going on here. If we rewind a little bit, we've got a snake minding their own business in the corner just to keep it safe. But because they're not out there getting food, they are not the biggest snake on the board. And so, that leaves Pasovedo the opportunity to come up and take out that snake. And then equally, Pasovedo has got some size advantage, has been using that to good effect, been gobbling up of snakes, but then has got themselves into a corner and doesn't have the planning, the pathing to back up that size that hunger for growth and has gone into the corner. So, these are the kind of things you expect from a game. Are there any comments? I mean, there's a question here in chat. What is the best snake? And I feel like I have to address this because there's no such thing as one best snake. So, we're watching right now standard games, which we will do for the tournament. So, this is your classic pure vanilla, you know, snake, battle snake game. But you'll notice as we watch the tournament, there are a lot of strategies, staying shy, staying small, avoiding confrontation, maybe being aggressive and attacking. Each of these battle snakes when selecting a move have 500 milliseconds to respond. So, there's dancing that edge in your machine learning algorithms about how deep are you diving? How far forward in the future are you trying to predict? And how much time do you have to do that? So, as we've seen in a variety of battle snake tournaments, there are a host of strategies that one can try. So, I will leave it up to you, the viewer, to decide what is the best battle snake. I don't think I will say it. So, one thing I'll also add onto that is, you know, what we've just seen here is the standard game mode. That's what we're going to be playing today. But there are a whole host of game modes. There are jewels, which is one-on-one, says Royale. So, you know, a snake that's dominant in one game mode may not be dominant in another. So, we change things up a lot. We change the game modes. We change the way that games are played. We add new obstacles. And so, battle snakes are having to constantly evolve as well, which keeps people and their algorithms on their toes. Next question in chat. Excellent question. Thanks all for asking. Is what we're looking at a replay or calling all the snake servers based on the game state at any given step? Do you want to answer that, Joe? Talk to me. Move into what we're going to see for the tournament. Yes. So, this is a replay. This is a replay from a game on Monday. However, this does give us a good opportunity to address something that we actually speak about in chat a minute ago about D-dossing snakes. All of the games we're going to be watching today are replays. These are replays generated from games. We are going to be playing some games live today. They're happening right now as we speak, in fact. But we are going to be watching the replays. That is going to be important for... Do you want to dive into the tips? Should we go straight over to the tips and dive into that? Let's dive into the tips. If you're watching and you're participating today... Yeah. Let me throw over to this. There we go. Cool. What have you got the tips? Are you have tips on here? Okay, cool. We'll do the tips on this one. So, if you are participating today, there's a couple of things that you should be aware of. Maybe I don't have the tips. Okay, there's a couple of things that you should be aware of. So, as we were alluding to, these games are kind of ran in the past. And so, if you, for example, see your snake do something non-ideal or your snake times out and it runs out the board or something like this, you might be tempted to go and live patch that and deploy. But again, we're watching that game in the past. Your snake may already be entered into the next game by the time we are watching it because the games run and then we play the replay and cast it for you here. So, try not to deploy during this period. Once we start the games, try not to deploy. Deploy is a risky. We, you know, us casters here, we are generous. If we see a snake is timing out and flying off the board and it looks like it might just be a server that needs waking up and we'll come to that in a moment, we will try and make some space and time, hold time a little bit for you to maybe give that server a poke. But we would highly recommend, if you are competing right now, go and make sure your servers are awake. If you are using a free hosting service, such as the Heroku Free Tier Glitch.com, repel it. If you're using something like that, make sure your servers are awake. Give those snakes a poke. Make sure that those services are up and running because when the first game goes, they are going to need to be awake. Other tip, oh yeah, so a tip that we came up in chat. When you create a bow snake, you have the option of making it public or private. A public snake can be put in a game by anyone. For the tournament, highly recommend you leave your snakes on private just because you don't want your snake to be de-dosed. What do I mean by that? If someone goes to put your snake in a bunch of games while you're playing, your servers are getting more requests, especially if it's a free server, that may be a problem. Stick your snakes on private. What am I missing? Tips, what other tips do we have? I think this covers it. Don't deploy now. Sit back, watch the games. Because the games are being run just a couple of minutes ahead of broadcast, if you don't want to have spoilers, don't watch those server logs. That's another good one. Yeah, you will know what's happened. That's also, if you are competing, you know what's happened before we do, before the viewers do, please do not post those spoilers in the chat. Be a well-behaved conscientious competitor. Shall we take a look at the tournament today? Actually, one thing I do want to mention, as I said, we did the exhibition cup the other day. There were some fantastic snakes. We're going to be seeing them all again today. These are the snakes ready to go, ready in their brackets. I'm going to explain how this works in a moment, but we absolutely cannot go into this new tournament without talking about how these competitors did in the tournament last week. We have a couple of snakes who did very well. Sandeep, we've got the top four snakes. Sandeep Snake, Pasovedo, Sandeep's Q-Con Battle Snake, he, him, Hiss. These snakes got to the top four. That is the finals. Then we had our winner, our winning game. We'll play it in a moment, but I'm realizing that I'm talking about finals. Would you like to explain how the tournament works? Sure thing. I'm just going to bring up a little schedule here. What has happened so far? Let's bring you folks up to speed. It's on Monday, October 11th, myself and Brad from Battle Snake ran a tutorial and a Q&A session from, I believe, 10 a.m. Pacific time to 1 p.m. Pacific time and then immediately ran an exhibition tournament. At most, participants had three hours to put together a standard Battle Snake using one of our template starter Battle Snakes. If you're interested in building your own Battle Snake, definitely check out docs.battlesnake.com. It has all of the getting started info, but these folks power housed through that process, ran through an exhibition, which Joe will be previewing for us. This was all in preparation. They had the rest of the week to get their Battle Snakes ready for today's tournament, which is going to be for some fabulous prizes. This is the tournament that matters. The first one was a warm-up and exhibition, but today we do have some prizes available. The top eight participating Battle Snakes are going to receive a $25 gift card to the CNCF store, as well as a $25 gift card to the Battle Snake store. So you can also perhaps sport one of these fine t-shirts that Joe and I are wearing. Top four is going to receive a $50 gift card for each of those stores, as well as a Battle Snake t-shirt. So you can spend that gift card on some other items. And first is going to receive a grand total of $200 in store card credits, as well as a Battle Snake t-shirt. So these are the stakes, highly desirable stakes in my opinion. They are indeed. They're beautiful t-shirts. The notebook especially is really nice. Oh yeah, I have a couple of those myself. And just a reminder for everyone, so for this tournament and of course for all of KubeCon, we have adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct. So definitely if you haven't had an opportunity to check this out, please do so. Definitely important to be familiar and we will be adhering to that for this stream and this tournament. Wonderful. So we've just heard quick notice to the competitors. We are starting to run the games. See sure deploys. Don't change anything. The games are running. Your snakes are in games. So the time has passed for deploys. Beautiful. All right. So to warm ourselves up, let's maybe get an eye on the competition. Maybe we can review some of those exhibition games there, Joe. That sounds great. Take a look at what we've got going on there. Sure thing. So as I said, we had four snakes which made it into the top four just to quickly run through those brackets. Here we go. So this is today's bracket, but just to give you an idea of how it worked. We started with group stages. Groups are free. Those snakes, the snakes that won from that, progressed up to semi-finals and then made it into the finals. And all of these stages were incredibly competitive. It was, I feel like I say this, you know, every time we knew about a snake, a new battle snake competition with a new crowd, but I do feel like it gets more competitive every time. But everyone did have had a really fantastic showing, but it did leave us with these four finalists. And that was Sandy Snake by William Hsu, Pasovedo by Pasovedo, Sandy's Cucon Battle Snake, who since we watched that replay just a moment ago has added some styling to that snake, which is lovely to see. And the wonderfully named He, Him, His by Cameron Curatori. We actually have a game of one of their finals matches. I believe this was the, was this the winning game? Was this the game I showed earlier? I believe we have the winning game. Final's game five. I believe we do have this. Give me one second. That may have been the one we watched. Yes, I believe so. So we watched the winning game perfectly. Great, we reviewed that game. So yeah, they were all thoroughly entertaining. We do have some, some other standouts that were really interesting in that they kind of came into the competition, swinging had a good go, but due to various tech troubles on the day, we had some replant servers not behaving in this kind of thing. Didn't make it quite as far as we want. So I want to give a special shout out to Mr Wick who has been hanging out in our discord server all week. I'm very excited to see what Mr Wick has pulled out and also Cromillo who with KubeCon Cup 2021. Mr Wick's originally entered wicked snake. It looks like we've got a second snake coming up for Mr Wick. It'll be interesting to see what Mr Wick pulls out. Let's go have a little look at the, the KubeCon bracket and see what we've got in the, in the, in terms of the snakes competing today. So with the, as overall mentioned, you can kind of build in anything and we have a little tag system to facilitate this. So we get an idea of who is running what. So these tags here describe, you know, we've got the programming language. We've got, in some cases, we've got the infrastructure, replet. These blue tags are the, I guess you can say the personalities. That's obviously very subjective. This, this person has tagged their snake as huggable, which. So, so confession, Joe, this is actually my test snake that I built during the tutorial, my KubeCon Cup test snake. And it's got an account called Rory. Yeah, yeah, it's an alternate version of my snake. But consider this like your pace car battle snake. It has an aggressive strategy of tracing the edge of the board, which is only going to get you so far. Right, right, right. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we've got a good range here. I was honestly surprised in the exhibition that we had relatively few go snakes. I thought being KubeCon, there would be, would be a wash with go snakes. We have three. We've got a lot of JavaScript. We've got a lot of Python. We don't have anything especially weird. I like Sandy Snake using the badly coded tag. This is actually in reference to one of our regular recurring Twitch shows, a snake from that show. But, you know, I support everyone in saying that their snake is badly coded. Definitely a question from chat. Any Kubernetes snakes at least it's hard to tell. So developers have to reveal this information about themselves. But hopefully some folks had chances. You can however rest assured that the battle snake infrastructure is posted on a Kubernetes cluster. So I promise you it's in there. And just to briefly get back, you know, I mentioned these top four competitors and showed you this thing. Let's talk about how this tournament works. So the group stages, we will see each of these snakes play twice. So we'll run a group stage. The winner will advance and they'll be removed from the group stage and we'll run it again. And so in this case, you know, there's three snakes, they'll play one of those snakes will win in advance and then the remaining two will play it again. So every snake gets two chances to advance. And then when we get to the semi finals, it's the same situation. Two snakes advance, two stay behind. And then the finals is the first to free wins. So that's not best of free. It is the first snake to win free games. So it can go for quite a long time as it goes back and forth. We had a bit of that situation on the exhibition tournament on Monday, where we had he and his initially, which way round was it? No, Paso Vado took the first two wins. What was looking fairly without challenge, they, it was looking like we were going to get a sweep all the way through to three. And then we had a couple of games where Sandy Snake and Sandeep's keep con gap, Ballot Snake, suddenly seemed to have changed their behavior. Obviously, the environment was right. The starting positions were such that they're able to get an edge they didn't have before. And that set the stage for a reverse sweep where he and his came from zero all the way through to three wins in one go. It was a super exciting time. And so hopefully we're going to see something a little bit like that today. Let me quickly roll over to this. How are we doing in chat? Has everyone got any questions before we move to go ahead? Yeah, I'll just answer some questions. So one question that's popped up, are the snakes open source? And if so, where can we see the source? So that is up to the developer's discretion. We do have a collection of the Battle Snake infrastructure is open source, including all of our starter projects. So once again, definitely hit up. I should bring this up. Let's bring up a URL for you, folks, so you can find it. I can also go there. Definitely hit play.battlesnake.com. That is the home pitch. Our documentation and see our community contributions. Some Battle Snake developers may choose to advertise that their Battle Snakes are open source. So definitely poke around. There is a beautiful awesome list maintained by one of our community members, which links to a variety of Battle Snake resources, including Open Source Snakes, testing tools and other sort of third party bits. So I'll throw this in the Twitch chat. There's a clip for a of Battle Snake resources out there for you folks. And this is real long. And some of the tools in here are really impressive. One thing I do want to call out here as well, there is GitHub Tags. If you go to the Battle Snake tag, you will find a collection of all the things tagged Battle Snake or the repositories tagged Battle Snake, including our official ones, as well as the community member ones. And you can set up email updates to get the latest news from this collection as well, which is well worth doing. And I've already mentioned the docs on the docs. There's a couple of things here to thanks for the new cookie warning. There's a couple of things here to keep an eye on the quick start guide. If you're if you're first diving in for the first time, it's a great place to start. And then our starter projects give you, you know, we've got some officially maintained starter projects and a bunch of popular languages. But then the community, you know, just constantly keeps creating new starter snakes in various things. There's even a Node Red one. If you want, if you're like, I want to play Battle Snake, but don't really want to write a whole bunch of code, Sam Mashin has made a Node Red low code starter snake. So there's all kinds of things in there. Okay. Well, I'm hearing that we are good to kick off the games. Are you ready, Aurora? Yeah. Have we made these folks wait long enough? We've prepped you. This is Battle Snake. I think we have. Let's get into some wonderful games for this, uh, KubeCon. I'm very conscious of the pronunciation of Kube at the moment. So just to refresh, these are the standings for today. So we're going to quickly whip through the groups and then dive into the first game. So we're going to be seeing group A play first. We're going to be seeing two games from group A. Each of these snakes has a, has two chances to advance and group A is going to be SK KubeCon, Sandeep's KubeCon, Battle Snake and Wicked Snake. Then we're going to move over to group B and we're going to see Purple KubeCon Snake, Sandy Snake, Includer Snake. I don't recall seeing Purple KubeCon Snake on Monday. That's exciting. Um, we might get a, you know, get some surprise upsets. Then we've got KubeCon Cup 2021, KubeCon Cup, Test Snake, which now I know is you as an imposter, Pasta Vado. So we've got the finalists are well spread out, um, through these brackets, which is nice. And then group D, he, him, his, Ekmek the Snake and Emily, Emily drinks, T's Snake. That's, I have refreshed and everything has changed. Let's do that again. There we go. There we go. I definitely have to say there's a meta game here of creating Battle Snake names and designs to trip us up. So yes. Yeah, they're absolute, they're absolutely it. Um, sorry about that. We had outdated brackets. I loaded these brackets up before the show and the brackets have changed. So ignore everything I just told you, let's run it again. So group A is Arya Stark, which is by Mr Wick, he, him, his, Emily drinks, T, group B is KubeCon Cup 2021, but Chromillo, Sandy Snake, Includer Snake by Proto Kit. Group C is Purple KubeCon Snake, SK KubeCon and Pasta Vado. Group D is KubeCon Cup, Tess Snake, Sandy's KubeCon Battle Snake and Ekmek the Snake. There we go. Let's run the game before anything else changes. Okay. Game one. Let's go. Wow. Uh, let me get the zoom level where I want it to be. There we go. Okay. So this is a little, this views a little bit different to the previous one. We haven't got the pumpkin spice lattes, but just as a reminder, these are the foods. These are the snakes. This is their current length. You want to be watching the current length because the biggest snake is going to be able to get those head to heads and you want to be watching this health bar when this gets low, that snake is in risk of starving out. And then the other thing to watch, you can't see it right now. When we start the game, you will see another number under the length, which is the latency. So as Aurora said earlier, the snakes have 500 milliseconds to send a response from their servers. If they do not send a response, they time out. During a time out, the last sent move gets repeated. So if you see a, I actually believe we have an icon for it now. It's not a red zero anymore. Is it? There's an exclamation point icon. Yeah, if you see a little exclamation icon next to the latency, that means a time out. And we did see quite a lot of that happening last time when during intense move placement, some algorithms were evidently hitting the ceiling of what they were capable of doing in the time. So that's good to go. So are you ready? Should we do a countdown for our first game of the tournament? Absolutely, from three perhaps? Yeah, from three. Okay, across the Pacific, we're going to be really out of sync. Okay. Three, two, one, balance snake. Okay, we've got early food grabs from everyone. Everyone's equal now. He, him, his the first up to five food. There's a lot of head to head and that's he and his going through Emily drinks tea and are you stark just having I mean there was some of these some of these snakes are evidently based off of ours not a state code, which gives them a kind of is encouraging a safe random walk strategy. But in this case, it did not pan out for these two snakes and they had a quick head to head. So that was a good game to kick us off. We're clarifying here because Emily drinks tea and it was he and his if I've got that correctly, because they are the same length, both battle snakes would. Oh, are you stark? Yes. Had one of those battle snakes been larger than the other, they would have emerged from that collision safely because they're the same length double elimination. Yeah, that's a great call out. And I do also want to call out Emily drink tea here because Emily drink tea snakes was one of the ones that was timing out on Monday due to some server issues. I am so happy to see that snake running and women about and doing its thing. Congrats Emily drinks tea and congrats he him his for being our first snake to go through. But that's not it for Emily drinks tea and are you stuck? They do have an opportunity. They took each other out in a head to head and now they are going to be dueling on their own. This is a very pleasing board and that gives me an opportunity to explain something. So the game starts our quasi random in that snakes will always be in this kind of second from last row slash column. There will always be one food spawning in adjacent to each snake. And there is always a food in the middle. This does give you some interesting potential advantages in that, you know, if your snakes food is on the way to the food in the middle, you can in theory get a size advantage. This is why this game state is very pleasing to me because it is a perfect line through both snakes can just do a straight diagonal run for the middle. We probably won't see that. But in a in a perfect world, we absolutely will. Let's see what happens. Give me one sec. Okay, let's kick that off. So are you start going to be drinks tea taking each other out with a head to head? Will they get to it this time? Are you start with a really pressing the advantage up to over double the length and they used it. They use that advantage. Sorry, Emily, tea for your next battle snake iteration. I think seeking out food is going to be the next step here. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's worth mentioning, I said like these snakes have not had long to work. They started on Monday and have been at a conference a week and now we're on the tournament. But we do tend to see like a typical progression through, you know, the journey of snakes where it's like, avoid walls, avoid yourself. Well, actually, maybe those are the other way around avoid yourself avoid walls happen around the same time. And then you start to make decisions about food, people then usually start going for food and then realizing that growing too fast introduced the problem of pathing. So instead of solving pathing, they stopped going for food. So Emily drinks to use other is a way along that journey. But congratulations are you start for being our second snake going through semi mark that game off. And let's revisit the brackets. So as we said, two games from each group. So are you start and he and his we're now progress to semi finals. We don't know which semi final group they'll be in yet because we have to see the rest of them. But that is our first two snakes going through to the semi finals. So next up is going to be group B with cube con cup, sandy snake and clueless snake. And Emily drinks tea is our first thing not to make it commiserations, Emily, but thank you so much for playing. And it's, as I said, it's been a really short time. So it's fantastic to see a snake warming up out in that time. Let's bring up group B. So this time around, we have sandy snake in the middle left clueless snake on the top right and cube con cup in the bottom left. Let me get a drink before we kick this one off. And the start positions are kind of all over the place. Clueless snake has a scone. Yeah. Clueless snake has a reasonably unfavorable one. We've got people shouting out sandy snake in the chat hydrate or died rate. Thank you for validating my decision there through to various wicked. Okay, let's kick it off. Oh, clue the snake timing out going up. And then we've got a head to head almost immediately by sandy snake. You have the size advantage. Okay, let's do some replays there. That actually might not. So was that a timeout? That's what I'm looking for here. It doesn't look like it just looks like just not respecting bounds. Just the default move. If you don't send a response to all chat is up. So when I see a snake go up like this, I assume timeout. But we do have latency. So and then sandy snake grab that middle food turned around and took out cube con cup. So well done sandy snake. We are getting some really short aggressive games. This is a turn eight game. You all did not come here to play. Oh, we're hearing from battle snake official that this was actually sending up moves. This was not a timeout. This was just an unfortunate algorithm snafu. And this clue snake did was genuinely clueless and did go up and out. So well done sandy snake. You advancing through let's cross that game off and get a rematch and see if clueless snake manages to avoid the wall this time. Clueless snake has a little bit longer to turn. So we've got this could be a five six a six turn game. We're ready chat. Bob Zox has got 10 cents on sandy snake. I don't know if we can encourage that. Good to see we've got favoritism in chat already. All right. No clue. I mean, I guess clueless has a direction has a purpose and nothing is going to dissuade them. Yeah, there's no false advertising here. You know, they said they were clueless snake and they went out straight for the wall. That's they did they delivered what they promised and that's all we can ask for and no more. I think what they've really done here is they've they've prevented the other battle snakes from demonstrating what they have available to us. I mean, coupon cup is still a curiosity to me. I don't know what it's like in the next round here. And also, you know, we've got a lot of folks who are new to battle snake here and they're doing a great they're demonstrating what happens if you climb with the wall and we've got to thank them for that service. We've got to thank them for that service. So that's group B. So we've got coupon cup and sandy snake going through and so our clue snake was Prada kit Prada kit Prada kit was was giving me the smack talk yesterday saying he was coming to absolutely dunk people today. Alex, what happened? Okay, so we're now into group C with purple cube con snake by another snake dev SK cube gone by SK and passive Vado by passive Adam. Let's load up that gay. That's not where I want to be on to be hit. Okay. So this is one of my favorite things about the the starting snakes when the game just goes, you know what, we're only going to use half the board. We want these snakes to be cramped. We want them to feel on edge. We want them to be pressured. So we've got passive Vado on the middle right SK cube con on the middle left and purple cube on snake down in the bottom left. But if a congested start, let's see how they do passive Vado was one of the finalists were pointing out and did look dominating. So a little bit of an uphill battle for these other two snakes. So passive Vado starting off strong with getting some good food getting the middle food up to seven. Oh, and then it hunted out SK cube con this. Yeah, I was about to say a really commanding lead. That was scary. Just squeezing out the opposition and then going for that head to head. It looks like we've got some aggressive coding here and I like it. This is a, okay. As you know, auto elevator, I have a terrible habit of overreading snake behavior. But like, I know this looks like intentional aggressive behavior there on that that part. Less so here. That just looks like a random collision. But yeah, well done, Paso Vado. Oh, wait, we're hearing from clueless snake. The replete that was powering that snake was actually deleted on Wednesday. So predicates not not entirely sure how it was even sending moves. So that's fun. F sin chat for predicate. But well done, Paso Vado. And thank you for sharing a predicate. We love to hear we love to get the background to the inside scoop on the snake disasters that we see in the tournament. Ghost replete ghost snake. Yeah. Okay. Purple cube con snake and SK cube con. The last chance to go through. We saw purple cube con struggling to get any food. We don't really know what we're going to get out of SK cube con. It decided to go out of bounds rather than collide with the body of Paso Vado, which is a choice. Well, I respect going on your own terms there. Exactly. So let's see, given the chance, what will they do? Both of them just hanging out. Oh, we've got some kind of simultaneous food gathering. But purple cube on snake edging ahead. They're now a neck and neck. These looking these looking like random walks, which is always nice to see. Oh, keep escaping going down loosing that size available for both these battle snakes. Yeah. This is the fun thing with random snakes where they start to just get huge really fast. There we go. Same choice. Got itself into a corner and then sent out of the arena. So yeah, as we say, it's the food spawned quickly outpaces the rate that the random snakes collide with it. And so this on how they have a growth spur, which leads to things like this. So well done, purple cube con snake. You are going through and commiserations to SK cube gone. Thank you so much for playing. And that's group C. One group remaining. How are you feeling about your chances? Oh, for the test snake? Yeah. No. Are you we're going to see you in the finals? I'm banking on a head to head collision by my opponents. That's the only way that this is going through. Perfect. So alongside a cube con cup test snake, we have sandeep's cube con battle snake and Ekmek the snake. And if this is it's confusing me because it's rebranded, but if this is the Samsung cube con battle sandeep's cube con battle snake that I think it is, they were also a finalist. So it's great to see them back in a group. Let's check it out. All right. Oh, what a pleasing color palette. Okay. So Ekmek the snake at the top middle cube con cup test snake with the lovely little caterpillar head on the, it was little caterpillar one that one. Yeah. Smart. Yeah. This is worth calling out. So we, we have persistent tournaments that happen quarterly. The, was this the winner of summer? No. Yeah. So a summer league winner smart caterpillar got to design their own battle snake customized head, which I think is adorable, which is why I think it's very great. Yeah. It's wonderful. And then sandeep's cube con battle snake is in the bottom left. That's the beluga head. That's the beluga head. Nice. Yeah. I lose track of what they all are. There's so many heads now. So this is our last group before we go to the semifinals and things really start to hot up. Let's see who's going to make it through Ekmek the snake going straight for that middle food taking territory and cube con cup test snake has gone out of bounds. It can't handle that bottom right hand quarter. It just can't. That one, that one specifically. Okay. And then Ekmek the snake with a head to head on sandeep, which was narrowly earned because they were heads, they were neck and neck on food right up until here. And then sandeep's got nowhere to go. They can't, well, they could go right. They could tail chasing go right. But tail chasing is maybe a step beyond where the snakes were at the moment. And so they went up into the path of Ekmek the snake. So well done Ekmek. You are going through great move too. That's a that's a deliberate move seeing that length and then taking that head to head opportunity. Beautiful. That's what we want. That's always the fun qualifier on on all kinds of battle snake viewing is if that wasn't a deliberate move. Okay. Cube come cup, cube con cup test snake in the top left and sandeep's cube con battle snake on the right. Let us kick it off. Cube one cup test snake needs to avoid that bottom right corner. It has not. I see what you mean. Well done sandeep. This is the outcome I wanted. You know, this is the pace car battle snake for you folks. And you, you, you passed it, which is what you needed to do. So I'm not sure the pace car metaphor holds up when you've got the pace car crashing into walls on the red but it is nice to see a snake through. Okay. So that is our group stages. Let's go to the standings and see where the semi-final blocks land. Okay. So are you stuck? Cube con cup, sandy snake and Ekmek the snake in semi-final a semi-final B is he, him, his purple cube con snake, sandeep's cube con battle snake and passer Vado. And although there are four, so go on. Oh, I was going to say, if you'll allow me to interject here for a moment here, Joe, these are our top eight. So these fine folks here are qualifying for prizes. So if you'll allow me to take a moment. So go into your screen. Those of you who are now in the prize tier, just to remind you what they are. We have, so for new top eight right now, minimum prize is getting that $50 25 each from the battle snake and the CNCF store. If you manage to advance to the next round, that goes up to $50 in each and then first place 100 in each. And just to show off these stores for a second, what types of things does this get you? The battle snake official merch store has a variety of lovely prizes. The socks are a personal favorite of mine. The meme stickers are fantastic. The chrome notebooks and of course t-shirts and other paraphernalia with the battle snake logo on it. And checking out the CNCF store, there is a lot in here. Let me tell you, definitely take a look at all of the different. I can't, I can't get over the Lego. When I first saw that earlier on today, I just couldn't believe it. Definitely what I would be spending mine on. These are adorable. Look at that. And the gopher. It's pretty fantastic. These are, these are cute. So definitely check out, these are where you can redeem your various prizes of your choices. So those are the stores and that is my interjection. Thank you very much. Sorry Joe. And what a fantastic interjection it was. Thank you for taking us to the stores on an odyssey of spending our battle snake winnings on fantastic socks and meme stickers. Those meme stickers to put some context on that. The battle snake community has given various hilarious terms to things over the years. We have a battle royale mode where, you know, typical like battle royale game, like there's a dangerous cloud that comes in and damages your snakes. They named out the hazard source and that's a sticker. There's always turn, is it right? Oh yeah, right. Right is the right battle snake move. Yeah. Yeah. You can't be wrong if you're going right, Joe. There we go. There we go. You can't be wrong if you're going right. And then that one in the image was top tier boomer. I can never remember the exact fact. Was it boomer is the collective noun for a group of rattlesnakes? Was that it? It's a Roomba. A Roomba. Is a collective noun for a group of rattlesnakes. Therefore, clearly a boomer is the collective noun for a collection of battle snakes. So yeah. Yeah. Perfect. I'm not going to deal with that chat message. Okay. It's cool. So semifinals. We have group A is Arya Stark, KubeCon Cup 2021, Stanley Snake and Ekman the Snake. We are ready to see those games. So let's dive in to semifinals A. Great. So we have a relatively well laid out board here. No snake has a clear path to the middle. They all have to go outside to get that food and come back in. We are at the level of competition now where we do see more aggressive food gathering from these snakes, especially Ekmek, should be a reasonably good game. One thing to mention, although we are at four snakes per game, it is still only two snakes per game go through. So we'll be seeing, we'll be playing a first game. The winner of that game will go through. We'll play it again with the three snakes, the winners subtracted, and then one more snake will go through. We've got chat chanting for Sandy. Let's go Sandy. Any other... I don't think I've seen the owners of many snakes in the chat. We've seen Prodikit. Have we got any of the developers in the chat here to cheer on their snakes? Let us know. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Let's kick off this game. First of the semifinals, several snakes. Oh my God. Okay. We're going to rewind that and watch that. There was a race for that middle food and Ekmek did not know what to do. And now Sandy Snake spent so long in that battle that they almost gave up the food advantage, but Cube can't come. Just made a little mistake. I don't really know what went on there. First thing I want to point out, 47 turns is probably the longest game we've gotten to. You can see that competition level rising. And now let's go back to that fight over the middle just to really show what is happening here. So Ekmek and Sandy both clearly going for the middle food, right? There is no disputing that. And then they get there and they're both like, hey, I'm about to collide with a snake of a similar head size, a boar. We're not going to go for that food. And then the beautiful dance begins. And Sandy Snake took the tie to turn, got it, and then finished off. Oh no. Ekmek went down into Arya Stark from mutual elimination. But you can see Sandy Snake was going to close that out. They were going for it. And then during this dance, Cubecon Cup has been up in the corner, minding their own business. They've got two foods, circle around, come down with the size advantage. And Sandy Snake catches up, and then Cubecon Cup Snake makes an unfortunate mistake. Yeah. And we see that time out there. Oh, time out, time out. Yeah. So there we go. We've got our first time out. So it looks like they went out just out of a timeout. Really unfortunate, probably something, either glitch with a server or just something running a little bit long. But they've got a second chance, but hopefully we won't get that time out. See about all fun and gains until you start winning and getting competitive. And now you're allocating enormous resources towards maintaining and managing your battle snake, which is not a thing one should feel guilty about at all. This is the correct thing to do. Correct. So chat we're cheering Sandy and that morale has worked. Sandy has gone through. So now we've got a second attempt for Arya Stark, Eggman the Snake and Cubecon Cup. And let's see. I mean, these all were looking pretty equal. We didn't get too much from Arya Stark because of that early head to head. And obviously Cubecon Cup had the timeout. It will be interesting to see if Eggman the Snake continues to go straight for the middle and how that goes without being challenged to middle position. Let's kick it off. So Eggman the Snake did go straight for the middle. Oh, the same thing happened again. Arya Stark is just like all about mutual eliminations. I mean, that's a good play battle snake. Maybe you're playing to win. Maybe you're playing to prevent other people from winning. You're just playing to be an agent of chaos, just purely taking other people out. Well, Arya Stark wins it for Eggman the Snake. Well done. I mean, well done, Eggman for getting through. But I mean, really, this was Cubecon Cup slash Arya Stark clinching that win, which does take Arya Stark and Cubecon Cup out of the tournament. Thank you for competing. Indeed. So I'm always scared at this point to go back to the brackets in case the semifinal bees wins are on there. So I'm just going to go straight into semifinal bee. Oh, okay. Once again, the snake battle snake is like, we're going to use half the board. We're going vertical this time. So he him hiss at the top, Paso Vado on the bottom, Sandeep's Cubecon Battle Snake on the middle right, which shall henceforth just be called Cubecon Battle Snake or just Sandeep because it's too long. Purple, Cubecon Snake, bottom right. Again, all fairly even food, not going to be much in it. Paso Vado as a former finalist and Sandeep is a former finalist of the two to watch. Oh, we've always got he and this. Oh no. It's going to be a spicy game, I think. It's going to be a spicy game. Let's kick it off. Okay, Sandeep already out win a head to head with purple cubecon and Paso Vado has the size advantage and is really gobbling up food at rapid rate. No one's able to really fend it off. The question is whether he's going to use it and turn around and start getting head to heads or if it's going to squeeze itself out and run out of room while the other stay small, which is a totally valid strategy. We see a lot of snakes staying small and just trying to survive until the biggest snake runs out of room and they've got head to head on purple cubecon snake. So he him hiss is probably going to struggle to catch up. We're going to be playing for space really and they've squeezed himself into a corner well done, Paso Vado. Wow. So 170, we made it over 100 turns, over 150 turns even. Oh, I mean some great maneuvering there from Paso Vido there. I just have to admire the coiling up along the bottom, like this path finding here, the entire edge of the board there and forcing the opponents to fight it out on the other, you know, and this looks a pretty purposeful diversion to head to head there, which is nice to see. Let's go back and see what happened to Sandeep. They were eliminated really quickly by purple cubecon. It'd be great to see if that was just kind of, you know, they were in the way or whether there was some, I love watching snakes rewind. I feel like we need to scrub like, you know, like the videotape rewinding sound effect. This looks like it was probably just opportunism. But nonetheless, also in whilst we're here, I just want to briefly point out something, give me, bear with me for a moment chat. I'm going to, I'm going to entertain myself for a second. I'm just going to, I'm just going to check something. So Sandeep and purple, we've got JavaScript and JavaScript. And then he, him, his and Paso Vido, we have go and go. Okay. Right. He, him, his and Paso Vido are on go. Sandeep and purple are on JavaScript. And I don't want to bring language laws into this. Look at the latencies. We've got literally, we've got 60 milliseconds for the two go snakes and over 200 for the JavaScript snakes. Just saying. Okay. We'll let the tournament sort out the details here, Joe. Yes, we will. Okay. So well done. I've forgotten who won Paso Vido. Yes. Yes. Cool. But the others still have one more chance to do that final. Okay. We have he, him, his in the top left purple, keep on snake on the middle right and Sandeep's keep combat snake on the top right. We're hearing from Cameron in chat that he, him, his is on an AWS server in contrast to a lot of the replet servers that we're seeing running. Let's rep a band word in the chat. Okay. Anyway, a band for the forbidden term. Yeah. I guess so. I mean, in replets defense, it's been actually very effective, especially for getting started. The 500 milliseconds is definitely an upper found, but you can get incredibly far with a role based snake, even with a fair amount of server latency. It's actually quite incredible to see how far one can go. Yeah. I mean, we have competitors who are like, you know, in high, I think actually there might even be one touching elite, but like there is a very high ranked snake that's still running on a Raspberry Pi under a desk, right? Yes. Yes. That is hot soup. Hot soup runs on a Raspberry Pi locally. Yeah. And yeah. And it chugs away. It is a very respectable battle snake. Great question here, Aurora. Do competitors try to keep the distance between the snake and the game server low? And I guess they mean the snake server and battle snake servers. And it depends entirely upon your strategy. So there are some battle snake competitors who have been competing literally for years at this point. And some of them have looked to reduce their latency because they are running rather expensive machine learning algorithms. So that can be an advantage. However, I will let you know that on the battle snake roadmap, it's a little, little secret secret sharing here. We are looking at trying to increase multi region support to try and not have that be such an issue. So today, battle snake servers do run in AWS, US West, but don't you worry folks for our international audience who've been very patient with us, we will be trying to even that playing field a little bit more. Yeah. And also just to mention, and we'll talk more about this at the end when we go look at the full league. But you know, there is, as Aurora said, latency, you get very far, you'll be surprised by how far you get without worrying about latency. And it's like, you know, it's kind of like, you've probably heard the whole rule of like, you know, you get 80% of the way with 20% of the work and then remaining 20% is 80% of the work. That's kind of where latency falls into that by the time you're worrying about latency, you're at like such a high level of play that, you know, it's at that point, you're like, yeah, I'm going to go buy an AWS server. Why would I not? Not a US, sorry, an AWS. But yeah, okay, let's get back to the games. We've left group B hanging. So let's find out which final battle snake is going to make it to the finals. Oh, yeah. Okay. So he, him, his people keep on snake or Sandeep's keep on about snake. Here we go. So all no super early limbs, we've got a small size advantage from he and his, but very quickly growing. Keep con and Sandy avoiding food. He and this is going to run away with size if they're not careful, but it's he misses starting to hover around them. I do wonder if there is some, some detection of size going on there. Oh, yeah. There we go first head to head against Sandy. Sandy got too close and purple cube con snake took themselves out and they got the size advantage, which is notable. So yeah, this was just unfortunate from Sandy. They reached him really the wrong place, wrong time. Purple cube con purple cube con snake has the size advantage here. So he, him, his has to go down. Sandy can go left or they can go right. They chose wrong. So that's a bit unfortunate for Sandy, but he and his gets that head to head. And the purple cube on snake with its size advantage just gets into a corner. And as we saw from your snake, corners are tricky. You don't want to, you want to avoid corners. If you path the wrong way, you get to this position where here they should be going down for some reason. Who can tell the brain of a snake, they go up and then up they go through the top. So congratulations. He has making it to the finals. Indeed. Let's see those brackets as reflect on where we've come from and where we are. And while we're doing that, I'm going to have a quick little look at something. So the exhibition finals where he, him, his pass of Vado, and then we've got some upsets. Oh, we were on Sandy's neck. Sandy's neck was in the finals last time as well, but Sandy has been replaced by Ekmek the next. So we do have a different final situation, which is super notable because the finals were already very spicy. We have a poll running in chat. If you want to vote for any of these snakes, who do you think is going to win? He, him, his Sandy's neck, Ekmek the snake or pass of Vado, drop your votes in the poll. I'm going to vote, not going to tell you who I'm going to vote on though because I'll be naughty. And also I would curse them because casters can never have favoritism that snake will always lose. So let's run back through the brackets and just give some thanks to the snakes who have not made it up to the finals with us. Group A, we saw Arya Stark and he, him, his go through and Emily drinks tea, fall out and then Arya Stark taken out in semi-final A as an agent of chaos, taking out KubeCon Cup with them and winning that game for Ekmek the snake. Group B, poor protokit, the ghost, clueless snake whose server was deleted but was somehow still sending a move. Ghost snake, the ghost in the machine taken out group B whilst KubeCon Cup and Sandy's snake moved through. Group C, SK KubeCon, not making, SK KubeCon was taken out in a hilarious circumstance but I've forgotten what it was. And then you did of course didn't make it through, which whilst we mourned KubeCon Cup snake with its cute caterpillar head, obviously we can't let the team win. That's just unfair. Yeah, that's okay. I'll somehow learn to survive. I think it's actually kind of an unfortunate joke at that point that every battle snake employee has in fact a terrible battle snake. So, you know, I'm okay with this. Some of us have several. Some of us have never not had a terrible battle snake. Okay, so the finals games are still running, which I'm going to point out because the first match we have official confirmation is a spicy one, so I'm very excited to see all of these. Again, I want to remind folks that the finals are a bit different to the games we've watched so far. The finals are not elimination based. They are the first snake to win three times. So that's not necessarily in a row. It's three times total. So we could be here for a while. There's four snakes. If every snake wins twice, that's already eight games and then we need a ninth game to finish it. So we could be here for a while going back and forth. Let's kick off that first game because it could be a sweep and done. Or as you know, the exhibition tournament gave us. We could have some surprises. So this is a spicy corner. I'm uncomfortable looking at this corner. All that food, all those battle snakes. Ooh, it's too dangerous. Especially Ekmek and Sandy. No, sorry. Yeah, it was Ekmek and Sandy that were doing the runs in the middle, weren't they? Yeah, I think Ekmek is in the most dangerous position here. My thoughts are with you, Ekmek. Really? You think Ekmek over Pasovedo? Oh, sorry. Pasovedo. I mixed up my apologies. Oh yeah, sorry. They are similar snakes. Yeah, that corner is scary. But Ekmek and Sandy will probably run to the middle. So I think they'll be okay. Okay. This first of the final games. Oh, hang on a sec. We've got, oh, interesting insight from Cameron, one of the snake creators in the chat. I think these four have been tested against each other a lot. Pasovedo's match history has a lot of games with the other three. So preparation. I respect that. Okay, here we go. So Ekmek and Sandy, mirroring each other as they run for the middle, leaving a gap that he missed to slide in and get that middle food. Pasovedo and he missed the two ghost snakes with the food advantage with Pasovedo just inching ahead. We've gone a long time without any eliminations. We're getting up to turn 100 and they're all pretty long. Ekmek is the smallest. Oh my, oh, this is getting silly now. This is starting to look like top tier, like this is looking like a full league game. And these snakes have had a week and we've got an elimination. Sandy getting stuck in the corner as Pasovedo and he and his are still neck and neck. Ekmek is going to be fighting for survival squeezed between two larger snakes. Oh, he missed around the outside, which is a scary place to be. This game, we're over turned 200 and Ekmek squeezed out and what happened? Oh, why Pasovedo? What were you doing? You could have got Ant Friend. Oh, no. Okay, that was huge. That was amazing. It wasn't that long ago. I'm going to try and rewind and see what happened to Sandy's neck. Okay, it was like 120 turns ago. Okay, Sandy's neck. Yeah, they're in heading towards the corner with a snake below them, a snake above them. Too long to come back on themselves is already looking dangerous. They go for a food. Oh, yeah, they go for two foods. They tile upwards and now their only way is through a snake that's far larger. So yeah, just never going to make it. It's a dangerous corner. We call it at the beginning. Yeah. Seventh parrot asked whatever is this? Well, I mean, like seriously, that was like, like we don't often see games in any level of play that go that long about a single elimination. Like that was pretty, pretty wild. I mean, chat poll called it he him his is currently the chat favorite and has won the first game of the final. Nice. How are we looking on the poll? So yeah, 47 for he him his and then 27 for Sandy snake and Pasovedo zero for Ekmek chat. You are so mean. Ekmek, you get my vote. Okay, game two. So that's one for he him his, he him his needs another two wins to make it. So much more, much more spread out bought in a pleasing diagonal symmetry. I seriously, Aurora, I don't, I ran about this all the time, but I haven't streamed to the developer with one of the Balcony developers for a while is stuff like this intentional because it feels like it has to be like the RNG has some like simple rules in it to like make this, this symmetry, right? Like pure RNG trust the machine, trust the cosmos. Okay, beautiful moments for us. Thank you, RNG's us. Okay. So sandy snack in the top right, Ekmek, the snack middle left, he him his bottom left, Pasovedo middle right. He missed with one game so far. Would it be a sweep? Let's have a look. So Ekmek doing what Ekmek does going straight for the middle, snatching it from the jaws of he him his we've got three snakes kind of neck and neck and sandy snake falling behind eat sandy eat. We've got one food this it's the the three green snakes are sandy's out by body collision unfortunately, but the three green snakes are spending a good amount of time there just running for the same food. These frightening near collisions just constantly keeping us on the edge here. Yeah, they're just all staying so close to each other or they're so that everyone is so practically hunting for food. Oh, he missed with a fortunate accident. And then Ekmek, as you say, closed off Ekmek not going into that food square because didn't want to risk the head to head with the biggest snake guaranteeing the death. This happens all the time. We saw this happen in the exhibition where you get these, you know, you get these things where just the order of your decision rules where you're like, Hey, I'm not going to risk that head to head. And so you flip the coin, it goes wrong when really you should just look to step forever ahead and gone. But this square is certain death anyway. I may as well risk going up. And then what happened to he and his just got tangled that I mean, a space too small for a large snake body. Yeah, could have could have tail chased Ekmek out of there, though. If it had gone up here, it would have survived. But I do want to call out that he and his did the classic move of refusing to crash into the wall and actually went back on its own body, which you've got to you've got to respect a snake that sticks with its convictions. So yeah, Paso Vado, one game for Paso Vado, one for he and his one for he and his. So we'll see. We'll have to see. We don't have a clear leader at this point. Okay. So we've got he and his bottom right, sandy, snake, middle, the snake, middle left and Paso Vado top left. Ekmek's got the clear, clear route to the middle. They're the closest they're going to get it easily. Go for it. No, you won't. Again. Paso Vado stole it. It's like a nature documentary. It makes me feel so bad. And now Ekmek is so small and getting squeezed from every angle. He and his also struck and get size and they crash into a body, well their own body, but they were going to die either way. I'm sandy, snake with some good size here. But Paso Vado again with the advantage and it took out Sandy. And now we've got little tiny Ekmek, a third of the size of Paso Vado just trying to hang out down the bottom here. Oh, Ekmek's got to eat. Oh, there we go. Yeah. This is, this is interesting where we've previously seen Ekmek try to compete on size, but now it's practically not eating. I wonder if they do have if they're doing some like, Hey, am I the biggest to maintain the size or if I'm the smallest try and you know, stay out of the way and be defensive because they're doing a lot of tail chasing. And yeah, Paso Vado. Oh, it's the squeeze. Paso Vado using their size brilliantly there. And you know, the minute Ekmek went up into this narrow channel into the half of the board controlled by Paso Vado, it was all over. They had gone down, you know, they could have continued to spiral, could have gotten some more food along the way, but it's so easy for Paso Vado to come over and cut them off here. Which, you know, having said that, Paso Vado was only one move behind on death. Like if Ekmek found another square, if they had tiled just a little bit different, if they'd gone up one here, this would have been a game for Ekmek. It's very close. Oh, congratulations Paso Vado, who now has two wins and only needs one more win to wrap this up with He-Him-Hiss in second place with one win so far in the final. Okay, still everything to play for though. We've had, we mean, we had this in the exhibition where we had a snake only needed one more win and then we went to two, three more games. So let's see what happens. Okay. Sandy's neck, middle right. Ekmek's neck, bottom left. He-Him-Hiss, top right, Paso Vado, bottom right. I'm looking forward to the dance of Ekmek and Sandy. Let's see how we get on. Oh, Sandy made it first. Oh, Ekmek taken out in the sand. Oh, and then Sandy, quick fire of limbs. So it is now the front runner against the runner up. This could be it. Paso Vado could take this. This could be it or He-Him-Hiss could continue with their run to the win. Paso Vado with a bit of a size advantage, playing very aggressive in the middle, taking up a lot of space, just beating He-Him-Hiss to the food almost every time. Oh, wow. Amazing head-to-head. That was incredible. Oh, none. He-Paso Vado looked like they were heading down for food and then the opportunity arose. He-Him-Hiss went left rather than right straight into the mouth of Congratulations, Paso Vado, the Akucon Cup Tournament winner. De-forting the Twitch poll. Yes, yes. So congratulations, Paso Vado. Let's go back to the brackets. So we've got three wins to Paso Vado, one win for He-Him-Hiss, and then not to be undersold. Sandy snuck about the snake. Although they didn't clinch out any wins, that was some of the longest games about elimination I've ever seen. Both snakes played brilliantly. I will deeply enjoy Ekmek and Sandy Snake running for the middle every time. Please, both of you, make your snakes public because I just want to put them into various contrived games to see what ridiculous patterns I can get for you running to the middle. And then you both gave everyone a run for your money. That was really fantastic. And congratulations to everyone who competed. As Aurora mentioned, as I'm sure we'll go through again. Although, you know, Paso Vado is the winner. The top eight. Everyone's been having prizes for ages, and the top four also get prizes, right? Everyone gets prizes. Okay, so let's quickly run through this. So do we want to review the prizes? Quickly see what everyone got. So Paso Vado being the winner gets a special prize. Let me just bring it up on the screen again here for you, Joe. No worries. There we go. So I'm very distracted by Twitch chat. Once again to all of our winners. Top eight, top four and top and first, of course, Paso Vado. Congratulations. You will be receiving gift cards for the CNCF store as well as the Battle Snake store. And first and top four, we'll be receiving a Battle Snake t-shirt as well. So wear that with pride. Enjoy it. We will be contacting you soon to arrange delivery of these goods. Perfect. And again, just a huge thank you to everyone taking part, everyone watching. It is and a huge thank you to KubeCon for having us today. It's been fun to be to be on a different channel. I want to kind of round out with telling you about a couple of things we've mentioned and we've called out to a couple of things on the way. If you enjoyed watching today and you want to see more Battle Snake action, you can head on over to our own Twitch channel, twitch.tv, forward slash battle snake official, where we do a variety of shows. We play games on Saturdays and on Thursdays. There was a banner for it right down there. Tomorrow we have Snake Pit Live. Snake Pit Live is, I don't know how to describe it anymore, it's evolved a lot. We play really silly game modes with a kind of meta competition. We have what's called the Castors Cup, which is where each of the castors has a team and snakes on Saturdays can come and join the Castors Cup. So right now you can see the House of Joe with 360 points because we're the best. And we've got the House of Curtis, House of Chris, House of Aileen last season's winner, but we don't talk about them. We do fun. We do really silly game modes. We do really big games with like 11 snakes on really small boards and really big boards. And we push the limits of the snakes in really fun ways. So that is tomorrow. And then Thursdays, we have a rotating range of shows. We have Coding Badly, which is a show where we push the limits of what you can do with Battle Snake by just building stupid stuff that shouldn't exist like a snake made out of bash. Deep Learning is coming up next week the week after? Yeah, the week after. And I will be, Deep Learning is the show where we deep dive into some educational aspect of Battle Snake. And we're actually going to be covering the topic of observability and installing a honey comb on Battle Snake by Penelope Zone. So that's going to be fun. I love over-engineered Battle Snakes. I'm really excited for it. Yeah, it's going to be marvelous. And Penelope, for reference, is one of our top tier competitors who emerged in the last league and is really dominating right now. And then we also have the community corner where Andrew keeps up to date with what's happening in the Battle Snake community. We get to hear from a lot of players. They just did the champions corner where a bunch of the winners from summer league came on and spoke to Andrew and had a chat. It was great to watch and good to learn from them. Right now, going on, we have the full league. This is open, but there's still 39 days to go. And how these leagues work is we have a running scoreboard that you accumulate points in. And just like any online multiplayer game, you know, I'm sure you've played multiplayer games where you get bronze and silver and gold. As you accumulate points, your snake advances through the ranks. And then right now you can see that we've got some snakes in Elite, some in Platinum. At the end of the month, we take the snakes from these brackets and we run a tournament just like you've watched here today with different tiers of play. So we'll have the Elite tournament, the Platinum tournament, etc. I want to call out one thing here. You know, during the show, you had the question about AI. We've spoken a lot about competitiveness of latency. One of the really great things about the full league is that, you know, you can, this will match you with snakes of a similar level to where you're at, similar level to what you're able to commit. If you, you know, don't want to get into machine learning, but you just want to have fun and write some if statements and write some cool snakes like the ones we saw today, you can jump in this, get to gold, get to silver, play great games against the snakes in your similar tier and have a really fun time. You don't have to be intimidated by the idea that there are, you know, some really intense snakes out there. You can shoot for those if you want to, if you want to use this excuse to get into machine learning, you can absolutely do that and see your points throughout the ranks. If you are like me and have accepted that you will be in silver league until the end of your days, you can have fun in silver league. Come join us. We have a good time. So that is full league. Really hope you join us. You can still enter the leaderboarders here. It is battle royale mode. So it's a different game mode what you saw today, which is quite fun. And we'll be kicking off the tournaments. If you don't want to enter, you do want to watch those official tournaments. We'll be starting on November 13th with all of the snakes that have placed by then. We've only got one in the elite so far, which is long time player proves, but by the 13th this will fill up with lots of other things. Oh yeah, still plenty of time to join fall league, even if you're thinking of starting building your battle snake today. So definitely hit up docs.battlesnake.com if you enjoyed what you saw today and want to start building your own battle snake. Give that a go, start with the starter projects. We have a discord server where you can come hang out, ask questions, get some help, and engage with the community. Yeah, for sure. So that is it from us. Thank you again. Thank you Aurora. It's been super fun. Oh, pleasure. Thanks everyone for joining us. Bye. Bye.