Hello -- and some guidance, please

[lesath]

Hi,
I'm Lesath, twenty-one years old and a first-year cognitive science student at Carleton University. I heard about the AI challenge on Reddit and I thought I'd dive in.

At Carleton, the computer science department recently made the decision to switch its intro to programming course from teaching Java to Processing. So I won't even start learning Java until next semester. Processing is similar to Java, but a bit "dumbed down" and more oriented to producing simple graphics. I've been poking around the learning resources available to me, and I think I have a few options if I want to participate in the AI Challenge. Should I:

1. Try to learn enough Java to squeak by?
2. Try learning Python instead? (Since there are infinite Python-learning resources online, including Khan Academy etc.)
3. Or, should I submit a language request for Processing? Is Processing even powerful enough to handle what we're doing?

I'm sort of ignorant about the nature of programming languages so I'm sorry if that latter seems like a very silly question! I would appreciate some advice.

[Scryer]

I'm probably the wrong person to advise you, since by today's standards I'm not very multilingual, but I will anyway.

Judging from the Wikipedia article on Processing, it looks to me like you'd have your best shot with Java, since Processing is closely related to it. I suspect you'd find the Java paradigm close enough to recognize. You might at least download the Java starter and see if it looks like a foreign language.

If that doesn't work for you, I'd suggest Python as a fall-back.

Requesting a Processing starter package probably won't help you much: I'd be surprised if it materialized before this phase of the contest is over.

[amstan]

[mac]

This is very subjective issue of course! My take would be: don't learn java [you will do it in your university career anyhow, if I understand you correctly], learn something new, that you won't be necessarily exposed to in your academic career and that you feel intrigued by. In my case that would probably be either `go` or `haskell`, but in yours could be anything else.

As for python (which is my language of choice): it's an awesome language, very well suited to AI. There is only a catch: it is very slow, and given the relatively short turn time in the challenge games, getting a well performing bot coded with python requires much more "smart coding" [read: subtle optimisations] than faster languages do.

Of course a language any programmer should know at least the basics of is C... so - if you don't know anything about it - this could represent a nice chance to get your hands dirty with it!

HTH, and welcome to the club!