Maximum PC

Do you guys think you could program (with the set of instructions that it is limited to) a bot that could do better then those already on the leader board?

http://www.robertandsherman.co.uk/botbattle/index.php

What exactly is this?

It is a game essentially, where you upload a text file with code to try and make a bot that can defeat all other bots.

Welcome to the future of warfare! =)

That's a pretty cool little bot sim. I created an account and read the help file. The language is fairly easy to grasp. It reminds me of a HLA language...

• if, if else, but NO loops... you have to use jumps instead.
• ....Interestingly enough, the documentation says that there are no subroutines, but it does support functions. Hmm...
• Built-in basic math functions (abs, pi, cos, sin, tan asin, acos, atan, etc).
• Built-in functions for locations of objects, yourself and the enemy.
• ....For example, enemy_x is the x-coord for the enemy bot
• ....It looks like you can only get the location of the "nearest" items (eg health)

You can obviously implement a strategy based around a FSM, but I'm not sure that you could generate a plan (due to your only knowing the location of the "nearest" health of ammo). Also, I didn't see anything on how actions/code from the two robots are interleaved. Is it turn based, real-time time slicing, etc.

I would consider starting out by creating all the obvious states and then tying it together with a random number generator (ie if rand is 0-10 shoot, 11-20 get health, etc). It would be easy to implement and you could quickly "learn" good values for the states by having two bots play head to head matches. That should get you pretty far, pretty quickly.

You can get your health state right?

Yeah, you can get your health and ammo and find out where you are "stuck". You can get the same info for the enemy bot. I don't know why they didn't make the help file available to the public.

It would be pretty cool if you could figure out a way to figure out more than one location for each type of item. Then you could do a little bit more planning than just running for the nearest health or ammo.

The langauge should be called bot assembly language. You can tell that this is someone who is looking forward to being a C programmer -- it is assembly language BUT you still get to end everything with a semi-colon. LOL. Why can't people just use Python for this type of stuff?!

He doesn't mention anything about the scoping of variables or passing variables. I also think that his functions are really procedures, but depending on the scoping rules, I'm not sure that you'd be able to create a useful side effect (ie what's the point). Also, it doesn't say anything about having static variables in the "functions". I think for me to really get into this game, I'd have to write some macros in LISP to expand my thoughts into this language.