robot games (was Re: Programming challenge)

[Andre Garzia]

On May 31, 2005, at 4:07 PM, yoy wrote:

> I remember a game called "Chip Wits." You had a robot and had to teach 
> him
> to walk around rooms and halls in a house using a simple programming
> language. It was so much fun!!!
>
> Great logic game. I loved it!!!

simple text robot games are very good to learn simple aspects of 
computer programming, I am fond of the "king of the hill" game were you 
would program your robot in a C or Pascal variant (depending on the 
game implementation). In "king of the hill" you would code a little 
robot that would be put inside an "virtual arena" where it would 
compete against another robots, the last one standing would win. you 
had special functions to probe the data surrounding your robot and to 
move and fire. It was pretty cool.

This days I am more fond of cooperative games. It's very easy to code a 
crazy robot that runs in random directions firing everything that's in 
Range, it's cool, but much more challenging then this is to code robots 
that would cooperate to work out a problem.

For an example scenario, imagine a map 64x64 tiles that is to be 
represented as a string, each char in this string tags what is inside 
that cell in the map. we could use # for wall, $ for money, * trap, o 
por teleport pod ( :-D ), numbers for robots and G for goal point, in 
our little scenario, robots would need to cooperate. so let us draw a 
little map, hope you guys are using monospaced fonts or this will look 
terrible:

##################
# 1        ##        $$$####
#         ##    ####           #
###$        $$#               #
####    o####o           #
########                   #
######           2          #
####              ##         #
###            #####       #
######         G#          #
#################

See on this little map we have two isolated parts (if the fonts are 
working), the upper one contains one robot (1) and some cash and a 
teleport pod. the second one another robot, a goal point and another 
teleport pod. Our rules could be such that:

	* A Robot can carry one unit of cash at a given time.
	* A robot can drop a unit of cash in a teleport pod and it will appear 
on the nearest teleport pod available.
	* To win robots must cooperate to move all money to Goal Point.


So just by manipulating strings we could create this virtual 
interactions. It's plain simple and yet so challenging and fun. I think 
we could create something along this lines. Or if we're in for mayhen, 
we could just make a maze, spill in some cash and the robots that 
collect most cash wins.

possibilities are endless.

Man, I really want to make this.

Cheers
andre

>
-- 
Andre Alves Garzia ð 2004
Soap Dog Studios - BRAZIL
http://studio.soapdog.org