Re: Aprone's self driving car (game)
I wasn't sure if I should join on this game, you know being the developer and all, but I've started messing around with a bot of my own. The fact that I wrote the game probably doesn't give me much of an advantage, since we're all working with the same data from the scanner.txt file. I also thought it would be fun to get the ball rolling, sharing my current ideas for a successful bot.
My first attempt was just for something very basic, where all it does it check to see if the tile in front of it is a wall. Either "A" or "D" are pushed just to steer the car around the obstacle. That continued to fail until I realized the car starts out headed straight toward a bit of an upside down V-shape. By the time my car was about to hit the first wall, it already had a wall on either side.
I started to plan out using "Z" or "C" to get around that situation, but realized none of that would mat ter unless I look at least 1 extra tile forward. Still wanting to stick to a simple design, I kept everything the same and just coded the bot to spend the first 2 turns heading to the left. This avoided the trap I kept getting stuck in, and allowed the bot to travel for quite a while surviving only on those simple steering rules.
My score was really good but it was immediately obvious that I could squeeze a lot more points out of it. I never had the car speed up or tap the break, so each turn was awarding me 10 points. I only look 1 tile ahead anyway (right now) so there is no reason to hang back so far. The next run added in a rule to jump ahead with "W" a few times along the way, and my score soared up to 554. I'm 100% positive I could adjust the code and have the car speed up earlier in the trip. The earlier I speed up, the more points I'll end up getting. I mean it wouldn't be hundreds of extra points or anything, but it may be dozens.
So that's where I got before stopping. There are so many different approaches to this game it boggles the mind. Imagine a car that looks ahead 2, 3, 4 tiles ahead and knows to avoid traps. A car could know when to race forward, and when to back off a bit to see further ahead. As more people jump into this game and work on bots, I think that high score list is going to explode into a race.
I do hope we get several people who enjoy this game enough to compete.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
