While we are waiting - PacMan vs Ghosts

[Parasprites]

It doesn't seem to have any activity though.

Anyway, they definitely need a better visualizer.

[MagnumPU]

This is awesome, thank you for sharing. The starter package is pretty nice, beating it is going to be enough of a challenge for me.

[PeterV]

I found another interesting contest, also from the University of Essex:
the Physical Travelling Salesman Problem Competition http://www.ptsp-game.net/index.php
It's about writing a controller that finds an optimal way of visiting way points using a spaceship. It's based on the travelling salesman problem, but with some extra constraints on the spaceship movements

[aerique]

[Parasprites]

Well it's the same people, so it shouldn't be a surprised.

But really, would it kill them to allow java bytecode submissions? They wouldn't even have to change the framework.

[cabbage]

The thing with Java is that it's performance might not be the best. But in programming challenges it shouldn't matter as the better algorithm always outmatches the better performing language.

Just kidding, but I hope Java won't be much of a change from C++ so I can participate as well.


ptsp looks very interesting, thanks for sharing!

[delt0r]

If your coding java for the first time from C++ you probably will have performance issues. Not because java is slow, but because java is not C++. So you can't write like C++ really. Otherwise there is no better way to learn other than by doing. As a rule of thumb you should be about within a factor of 2 of C/C++ code performance wise for "general algorithms" or general computation. In my cases i in fact have better performance than C/C++ code it replaces. But that is a bit of effort. For some raw, but fairly simple number crunching like small matrix multiples or small FFTs, then C/asm is going to be much faster.

Unfortunately I think that C++ to java is quite a change really. Just think that every object is by reference/pointer and that every method is virtual, with no multiple inheritance. Also generics are *not* templates, so don't expect that stuff to work the way you want. Method call overhead is very low (recursion can be faster than loops) and short lived objects are also pretty efficient speed wise with the JIT.

Ok so that was more or less OT. meh is pretty quite here right now anyways.

[drobles]

[Memetix]

Just to let everyone know, the PacMan vs Ghosts competition is about to end, submissions closed about 3 weeks ago and we are in the final week of play-offs. I know some people from the last aichallenge joined in and came up with some great bots. The level this year was a lot higher with the best pacman bots averaging about 90000 points (compared to a winning score of 40000 in the previous competition). Even so, the best ghost teams also managed scores about 20% better than last year.

The good news is that the next competition will start in about a weeks time and if you want to join in, you can download the software and start programming. There have been several good ideas for improvements to the match-up software and tweaks to the game scoring. As yet it has not been announced which of these ideas will be implemented.

[PeterV]

While waiting for the new aichallenge, this is also a nice contest I've signed up for: http://www.codecup.nl
They support Pascal, C, C++, Java, Python, Haskell or Javascript
The final deadline is January 12, 2013, so time enough left to do some coding