Comments on thisismyrobot: Distributed tournaments for the Google AI Challeng...

I'm a bit over the ants game now (they are sti...

2011-12-28T17:15:11.173+11:00

I'm a bit over the ants game now (they are still playing on tcpants.com and I'm getting beaten even after I studied runevision's code and the xathis code as well). There's a lot of little details and I just haven't got the patience to fine tune it.

I did have a go with a neural-network style ruleset that can be optimized by repeated games and simulated annealing. It does handle micro-optimizations quite well (e.g. balancing off several weighting factors) but the CPU required is large and to some extent a game can go either way just by random chance, so to run it properly would probably require a full fledged genetic algorithm, a large population and a lot more electricity than I can afford.

Hey this is off topic but can I get you interested in PIC programming? I've had some USB boards designed around PIC18LF2455 chips and 20MHz clock crystals. It was one of those projects that seemed a great idea long ago but other things (job, life, etc) took it over. I did get as far as getting libusb (on linux) to talk with the chip so you could toggle a few lights and stuff.

There's on-chip timers for PWM and stuff, I was thinking of motor control or perhaps a security system. Anyhow, I've got gear that's been sitting in the shed for years if you want to run with it.

Hi Kettling, thanks for the comment! I guess, str...

2011-12-28T09:49:21.993+11:00

Hi Kettling, thanks for the comment!

I guess, strictly speaking, I shot myself in the foot with the post, since you beat me (1577) ;-)

I ended up getting a loooot of timeouts due to inefficient map handling code - but I really enjoyed the competition anyway.

Cheers,
Robert

Hey thanks for the blog entry, after reading this ...

2011-12-24T13:19:59.944+11:00

Hey thanks for the blog entry, after reading this I entered the competition and achieved rank 1025 (out of Australians that's 26th) with a week and a bit of work (late nights and weekends outside my real job).

I was programming in C and I'm happy with the overall speed and efficiency I was achieving (pathfinding, mapping, etc) but I never got high quality battle code into it so my ants died badly when confronted by an opponent with better front-line formations.