This is Greg and my jumbled heap of code produced for the BattleCode 2007 programming competition at MIT.
Our overall strategy can be described as follows: our four archons stuck together and spawned a large cluster of scouts (and I believe soldiers, but for the longest time we were convinced that four tanks were the way to go). Whenever we encountered the enemy, we buckled down until we destroy their units.
One highlight of this code was definitely Greg’s regular-expression encoding of Dijkstra’s algorithm, which allowed us to perform perfect path-finding but without incurring tons of instructions (since calls to standard library routines such as regular expression substitution had a low constant cost). For this hack we won a Sony PSP.
Another neat feature was our EMP-spawning strategy: whenever we saw an enemy archon, one of our scouts (somewhere in the middle of our cluster) would evolve into an EMP, which would then pursue the archon. The other scouts would concentrate on defending (clearing a path) for this EMP by walling off and attacking potential threats.
Other than the above information, I’m afraid I can’t recall much else about our entry. I can’t even remember which of the directories to point you to if you wanted to see our final submitted player. …Yeah.
We also have a 2008 competition entry, though we didn’t have nearly enough time for that. This time we hosted our code privately over at Assembla. The highlight of our 2008 code is that we parameterized many aspects of the fundamental strategy (e.g., how much archons preferred to spawn each of bombers, soldiers, etc.), and then tried to optimize these parameters by using a parallel genetic algorithm that pits our generated variants against each other.
BattleCode 2007 Team Little is released under the GNU GPL3.
Copyright 2008 Yang Zhang.
All rights reserved.
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