Programming Contest: Mars Rescue.

[Roger.E.Eller at sealedair.com]

Andre,

That sounds like allot of fun! The objective of plotting the shortest path 
sounds very similar to what Strabo Pathfinder does. Strabo is a program 
used by robotics enthusiasts to map out the rooms of their home to allow a 
robot (we'll assume that it is a mars rover) to move freely on the map 
without crashing into walls and furniture. More info about Strabo 
Pathfinder can be found at:

http://www.wehali.com/robotics/strabo.htm

Anyways, the algorithms used to plot the shortest route is one that are 
Dijkstra and A* (commonly used in games). I have no clue as to how it 
works, but I would love to see the algorithm recreated in transcript.

Roger Eller <roger.e.eller at sealedair.com>


On 01/17/2005 at 11:56 PM, Andre Garzia wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> doctor dobbs journal is sponsoring a programming challenge called the
> mars rescue. They want as many languages as possible to be featured in
> the competition. I thought why not team up a Rev team? we've got till
> feb 1 to ship our code...
> 
> http://www.frank-buss.de/marsrescue/
> 
> The contest is a "simple" one, program receives a text input with map
> instructions in ASCII, think a little, plot shortest path to the
> object... much more info at the url, I am reading it still. But we
> could team and use MagicCarpet and RevChat for our world wide
> coordinated effort. I could provide FTP and eMail accounts as needed at
> WeCode.org
> 
> cheers
> andre
> 
> --
> Andre Alves Garzia ? 2004
> Soap Dog Studios - BRAZIL
> http://studio.soapdog.org