Scratch

I really want to suggest Chess.    It's not simple, I'll admit; but you could always have a built-in library of functions for representing pieces, moving them, etc, that everyone's code could use. 

just NOT chess
i'd take a solved game, maybe checkers or something

bobbybee wrote:

I might join, depending on the game.

Yep I've got to agree with this, I'd at least want to be playing a game I understand.

Since nobody is really enthusiastic (or confident, whichever way you put it) about doing it on their own, how about we make 2 teams instead? Then slinger can join, too, AND I don't have to set up matches (which I personally find a very unfair way to host a tournament, since often I get stuck with the top players in the first rounds)!

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the current "maybe"s are:

blob8108
sparks
rookwood101
bobbybee
roijac

Hardmath123, if you think it would be fair. I'll release the "pit against" script publicly, so anyone can rerun the match on their own to double-check.

As far as the game goes, how about Hex? You play on a grid of tesselated hexagons, taking turns coloring hexagons red or blue depending on your team. Winner is the first person to get a continuous line of hexagons of his color from one edge of the board to the other.

That sounds pretty interesting... There could be a lot of nice strategy programming to go with that!

me?

@hardmath, why not just link to wikipedia? 

Maybe we should set a competition start date and advertise a bit to give other people a chance to take part? I'm still not sure if I'll have the time, exams are coming up, but it sounds like a wonderful challange!

Haha, my exams are 4th May to 24th May! I'm really sorry! What I might do, though, is run an AI pathfinding competition after that, since I'll have no Uni until September (Mega-long summer holiday, I'll have to take a summer class or something to stop myself going mad at home).

In the meantime, you could work on a basic framework for representing the board in Javascript, for everyone to use to develop their AIs. It'd be really neat if you could render the board on screen, too, so you could see the AI playing — maybe using Canvas, or a library like Raphael?

Ok, so the teams are (so far):

Blue Team
Roijac
bobbybee
Red Team
blob8108
(Hardmath123 if it is still short of one player on May 1)

@blob8108: The game will be available as a download where you can watch the teams play in real time on an HTML5 canvas. Later, I'm going to write the entire match as a Scratch program (animation) for all to see.    Here's my current prototype for the board:

Each row of hexagons in the rhombus is an array, with each member representing one place (from left to right). A member can be "R", "B", or "-", standing for "Red", "Blue", or "Empty". Each row-array is contained in a larger array called "board", from top to bottom. So board[0][0] is the top-left hex, board[9][9] is the bottom-right, and board[5][5] is the middle hex.

The Red team must get a continuous line from any item of board[0] to any item of board[9], while the Blue team must get a continuous line from board[n][0] to board[n][9], where "n" could be anything.

Does that sound good?

Last edited by Hardmath123 (2012-04-25 01:44:54)

MoreGamesNow wrote:

This game would work perfectly with a trinary-code bitmap (too bad they don't exist  ).

Holding off on this until exams are over is probably a good idea.

Each team should make sure its computer can play from either side of the board.  I'm a little concerned that this game might be simple enough that almost every game would end in a tie.  I actually would advocate a more complex game (like chess?).

chess is way too complex.
and theoretically the first player will always win 

suggestion: each team has to make something a bit random...

no, it's not complex at all...
just think about a good algorithm to find all available next moves, that includes:
pinned pieces
check
castling
promotion
en passant (we could leave this out)

come back to me when you wrote one...