 | from David Bolton
Speed challenges seem to be the most popular and the new Challenge 30 already has one entry! Thanks to all 13 who entered Challenge 29, and the results are detailed below. It's also encouraging others to enter seeing the updates, so keep entries coming in and remember you can submit multiple entries! Have a great week!
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In the Spotlight | Challenge 29 Final Results plus Challenge 30
Congratulations to Michael Chock who just beat Pedro Graca. The differences were milliseconds and I reran them a few times to check. Thanks to all 13 who entered and the range of times was pretty narrow. Challenge 30 Published You get to zap the surface of a planet from your orbiting spacecraft but the targeting system is broken and so you must define the targeting locations according to the challenge's rules. With five different sizes of targeting areas possible your program must reach every location as economically as possible while not zapping settlers. There is also a file of settler locations consisting of 10 pairs of numbers separated by a comma, each pair on a single line and each value in the range 0-99. E.g. 12,34 45,87 etc etc Good luck!
| | Thinking Outside the Box
Game AI has come a long way from the 80s and computing power has increased several thousand fold. The AI I wrote in assembly language for a simple Empire game was reasonably sophisticated but hardly compares with say AI for a team of soldiers in a 3D shoot-em-up these days. However even learning techniques can sometimes end up with rubbish behavior as witnessed by this video. Part of the joy of game playing is gaming the AI. In anything but the simplest games, humans always have an advantage over an algorithm; they are just too devious, sneaky and prepared to try different approaches. So a newer approach is to do what animators do. Look at a human's behavior and do the same. Animators capture motion with special camera and tracking devices attached to clothing. Researchers Jeff Orkin and Deb Roy are trying to model a waiter's interaction in a restaurant with a simple game that feeds them data. You can participate and help them.
| MandleBulbs - 3D Fractals
While Mandlebrot sets have been around since the mid 80s, it's only the last few months have seen the emergence of MandleBulbs. These are similar to Mandlebrot sets but in three dimensions and the images are just stunning and look like they were formed naturally. Unfortunately, source code in C, C++ or C# is very thin on the ground, just about non existent, partially because it's new and it also requires a lot of intense processing. The equations are more complicated - see Wikipedia for a discussion. But if anyone has source code, please let me know so I can link to it. I suspect we won't see any for a while because it's so new and more complex because of the 3D rendering involving coloring and shading that it could be commercially exploited. Eventually there is bound to be an open source version.
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