The morning after build
November 12th, 2005
Well the AI Battle has come and gone. Sorry for the lack of liveblogging, but time was way too tight to do anything but code (and over design).
Originally the competition was supposed to end at 8. As 7:50 rolled around, Jarrett and I finally put our untested, undocumented, uncompiled together in a single file and compiled it. No love and no system.out. Frantically we tried to code up a random bot so we’d have something to submit, but just as 8pm came down, the organizers graciously extended our alloted time an additional hour. With new wind under our wings, we quickly solved our system.out issue which immediately led to the discovery of three small but devistating bugs. By 9, “Zaphod” was running well. Both other teams, Brad and Zam, and Kenshi and Geetha also had working designs. Our design was much more conservative while theirs both included offensive logic. Something that we may regret.
Overall, I have to say that I was very impressed and enjoyed myself. There was a ton of people participating and we all had a good time. It was a bit disorganized, but for a first showing, it was better than expected. I even won another Microsoft tshirt. I’m looking forward to the day when I don’t actually have to buy clothes anymore. The results of the competition should be up by the end of the week, I’ll let you know how we placed. In the mean time, I submit my battle playlist for your consideration.
Jarrett is the fastest coder I’ve ever seen,
Sean
joe
November 14th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
I would comment but I do not know what you are talking about
LDUB
November 14th, 2005 at 10:12 pm
I think that duncan tossed out a burn at you sean. If I were you I would retaliate, I think that I spelt that wrong.
joe
November 15th, 2005 at 2:18 am
so i was so bored today that i broke my no msn pact and started blogging again
http://www.joesalt.blogspot.com
you promised daily comments and i expect them
sean
November 15th, 2005 at 9:42 am
Did he go back and delete it then? I don’t see any comment from Duncan…
joe
November 15th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
duncan commented only once and it was on his own site, oddly enough
that vain bastard
joe
November 15th, 2005 at 6:12 pm
wait, nm its there for me
sean
November 15th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
Ahh I see it now. Had to use the find tool to find my name. I dunno, that’s pretty spot on. The only thing I could say in response is that at least I’m tolerable.
Doc
November 15th, 2005 at 7:51 pm
true
joe
November 15th, 2005 at 9:30 pm
i like how you linked it as joe ^_^
CS & the City » Blog Archive » Zaphod for the win
May 24th, 2006 at 11:49 am
[...] Our bot "Zaphod" was basic in the sense that it did not try to pick blocks with the intent to block the other player. Instead, we worked on creating a dynamic path-finding algorithm that would judge the advantage of picking each square that it possibly could and then choose the one that gets us closer to our goal. This made it relatively resiliant to attacks as it tended to walk around most blocking attempts [more about our development process]. [...]