(see the end of this post for remarks I’ve gotten about the vbox image)

So, the next Google AI Challenge seems to be almost ready to get going, albeit six months later than I expected.

As blogged about earlier this year I have been worked on the Common Lisp starter bot for the challenge, an alternative starter bot with a proxybot, some Youtube videos and now a Virtualbox image with an Emacs+Slime environment ready to go.

Due to the long delay for this challenge to get started some of these projects aren’t quite up to date anymore but they should still be quite usable and at least get you started or help you along.

The VirtualBox image is up to date as of writing this post and any comments on it would be welcomed. I will not make a new image (although someone else is free to do so) but if possible I will provide a patch on the AI Challenge forums.

On booting the image it will start up SBCL, Emacs and Slime (connected to SBCL) with some instructions in the scratch buffer. Perhaps it is a good start for another Lisp-in-a-box project.

I am not sure how much time I will be able to spend on the current challenge due to also participating in the online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and starting a three month sabbatical gig writing an iPad client for a startup November 1st.

Specific Remarks about the VirtualBox Image

Right, I’ve been computing like this for so many years that I totally forgot about this.  The parens have been swapped with the brackets otherwise Lisp programming becomes quite painful. If you want to reset this check out keycodes 18, 19, 34 and 35 in ~/.xmodmaprc and reboot the image.

Now that I think of it, Control and Caps Lock are probably swapped as well. That’s done in the ~/.xmodmaprc as well.

Comments

matt forbes
A few weeks ago, I grabbed your proxy-bot version and had mixed results. The proxy-bot works great, and has been a helpful development tool. My problems were with the play-game module, which wouldn’t cooperate =/

Either way, your infastructure gave me a lot to work with, thank you.
Wednesday, 19 October, 2011

aerique
Sorry about that, I should have axed the play-game module earlier and been more clear that one should use the official play_game.py for running normal games.

Also don’t hesitate to email me with any questions or problems. I don’t recall seeing an email from you.
Wednesday, 19 October, 2011