Hello everyone + questions

[angeladik]

My name is Adrian and I'm a student of Automation and Robotics - 3rd year. In next semester I will start my lessons with AI so I look for additional knowledge/experience in advance. Unfortunatelly, I had no time to try with Ants, hope I will manage to take part in next competition. My experience with programming isn't high - just basics with C, C++, Delphi and Pascal. I've checked many posts and my pont of view is that most of you use C, Java and Python. Could you compare those languages focusing on:

* possibilities
* memory consumption
* working speed
* difficulty of use
* other important things for AI/contests

I would like to know if they are similar or one of them (or maybe different one, not mentioned so far) is better. I like challenges so learning new language or refreshing the knowledge will not be a problem (I hope so).

I am interested in AI because of it's great possibilities. Right now I'm thinking about making a bot for RTS game which could learn over time (neural networks) and finally would be able to play against player. He could help the player to become a better one by making tips and pointing mistakes after (or during) game. Is it possible to connect a bot to such a game? Is it legal (EULA)? I want to make a bot for offline game (like old but good Cleopatra) to check my skills and test what such bot needs to have in its code. In addition, is it possible to find out what data player recieve (so I can have input data for my bot)?

Hope I can find out more about programming and AI on this forum thanks to all of you.
Any request is welcome, PM or post.

[MagnumPU]

I don't have any benchmarks handy for you, but this post is very interesting, you might have seen it:

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=2230.

Migi32 did some analysis on the final results, he/she graphed the results by country and also by programming language. The x axis shows the expected result, y axis the actual result for each participant in each group. Expected result is a player's rank in their group divided by the number of participants in that group, multiplied by the overall number of participants. So if the participants in your group tended to have greater expected ranks than the actual ranking, your group performed well.

It's up to you to determine why certain groups did better than others. Some one has suggested, for instance, that the language barrier might have caused fewer 'non serious' entries from Russia than from English speaking countries. Someone has also suggested that it was more difficult to enter a C++11 submission than a C++ submission, which might have accounted for the C++11 group performing better than C++ in this graph.

I think also that if you understand the difference between C++11 and C++ (which I do not), you are probably a more experienced programmer. I think this might also explain the difference between VB and C#, because I'm pretty sure they are basically the same language with a different syntax.

Some languages are definitely faster than others, I would think compiled languages are faster than interpreted languages. I think C should be the fastest, but it might be difficult for a lot of people to keep code organized without OOP.

As for myself, I think I'm going to do C++ next time (I wrote ants in C#), but you could probably do well with any language if you're smart about it.

I read your other post, you have good ideas, I'm looking forward to seeing more posts from you.

[angeladik]

Thanks for the answer. I will certainly compare differend languages in future. I asked about it because programming in Java gives opportunities to make programs (games?) for Android, which becomes more and more popular. I know that good programmer knows few languages at once, but so far I am not a programmer ^^

[angeladik]

Comming back to my other questions, is it possible to connect a bot to an RPG game? Is there any way to find out what data game sends to player (like position of unit, actual resource value etc.)? I expect that all we can see in a game is represented by a series of numbers. The next step is to make a graphic representation of them. Am I right?