(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.
I have made two screencasts showing the setup and usage of the proxy bot for the upcoming Google AI Challenge. This was at the request of McLeopold..
For the Planet Wars challenge I’ve tried to explain the use case for a proxy bot on the forums. Please read that post if you have no idea what the proxy bot does, although I will try to sum it up now: the proxy bot allows one to develop your actual bot in the usual ‘Lispy’ way[1] while the game engine runs and kills the proxy bot.
Work is in progress for the next Google AI Challenge and I’ve been working on the Common Lisp starter package. At the request of the organizers the starter package has been made very basic.
A more extensive starter package with proxy-bot functionality is available at: http://github.com/aerique/google-ai-challenge-2011-1-ants/.
It took a while but Common Lisp is finally supported on the official Planets Wars game server (Google AI Challenge)! (In the meantime one could use dhartmei’s server (and you still can since it offers some advantages like more games in a shorter time).)
The Google AI Challenge should start any day now and I and “anwyn” have both made Common Lisp starter packages. anwyn’s follows the API of the other starter packages more and is perhaps a little more lispier (I like LOOP a lot) and mine’s a little more bare-bones: just the basic communication with the game server and a silly example and you have to do the rest.
There’s a new Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars.
It seems they’re also working on adding support for Common Lisp due to the number of people that used it in the last challenge. Awesome!
They’ve finally added Common Lisp as a supported language to the Google AI Challenge. (Just before they stopped adding new languages, phew!)
There were some issues getting my starter pack to work on their server since they’re running an older SBCL (1.0.18 on Debian) and that didn’t support the “–script” switch. That combined with them being very busy meant it took a while. We were passing error messages and solutions back and forth only once every other day.
For those who’ve missed it: Google AI Challenge 2010.
There’s no Common Lisp starter pack (edit: since this is getting misinterpreted I meant a CL starter pack for the AI Challenge) but after a particular nasty adventure spelunking for days through an archaic database at work, fighting through the 20 years of cruft that has been build up inside of it and finally finding and fixing the problem I decided that I needed a break and wrote an initial version of a Common Lisp (SBCL) client.