Architecture

Code Colosseum has a peculiar architecture when compared with software with similar purposes (e.g. contest management systems): all user programs run on the user's machine. This is not that unusual, in fact some competitions, such as the Facebook Hacker Cup, already evaluate all contestants code on the contestant's machine. However, these competitions all share a common trait: there is no interaction between the user's code and the remote evaluation program but the initial input download and the final output upload. Such systems are unable to deal with interactive problems.

Code Colosseum provides a system that has both the ability to deal with the interaction between the user's code and the remote evaluator and executes the user's code on the user's machine. To achieve that, it creates a virtual connection between the user's program and the remote evaluator, such that, in its simplest form, the user's program standard output is redirected into the standard input of the remote evaluator, and vice versa.

Note that, unlike more traditionals contest management systems, Code Colosseum's primary purpose is to deal with multiplayer games, as such the concept of the more traditional evaluator is substituted with the concept of game manager, which is a program that manages an instance of a game, collects inputs from \( n \) clients, computes the game simulation accordingly, and sends back the updates.