(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’m putting this out here since Google queries for this situation didn’t turn up anything useful for me.)

Last night I had to add some text to about 5000 PNG files and I knew about Zach Beane’s ZPNG package for writing PNGs but I didn’t know of a package that would read them.

Update: he linked me to this restatement on #lisp: http://cryptome.org/0005/dod-lisp-sol.htm

Does anyone know what has happened to David O’Toole? He hasn’t been heard of since a last curious post to the lisp-games-dev mailing list: http://lists.common-lisp.net/pipermail/lisp-game-dev/2011-July/000158.html (read the whole thread)

His website, blog, twitter and github have all been either removed or cleared:

Okra (Common Lisp bindings for the Ogre3D engine) hasn’t seen a lot of work lately. It covers my current needs and I’ve mostly been off to other projects. However, there’s good news from the Ogre camp: there’s now a community effort to create a C API!

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/.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Toy Project
  • Environment
• Generating Random Code
  • Operators
  • RANDOM-ELT
  • Generating Random Function Forms
    • Limiting RANDOM-FORM
  • =INPUT=
  • Testing RANDOM-ELT and RANDOM-FORM
• Running Generated Code
  • SBCL note
• Population
• Fitness
• Generation Functions
  • Traversing Nodes
    • N-NODES
    • Picking Random Nodes
    • Replacing Nodes
• Cross-overs
• Mutation
• Advancing a Generation
  • Evaluating a Population
  • HEAD
  • Running the Advancement
  • Finding a Solution
• Conclusion
• Thanks

Introduction

While my final ranking in the Google AI Contest was disappointing (280th), it was a very educational experience and was totally offset by Gábor Melis’ dominating win using Common Lisp as well.

The Planet Wars competition has been running for a month now and the deadline for submissions is Saturday the 27th of November 2010.

Don’t let the fact that it has already been running for a month dissuade you from participating. If you’re an experienced programmer a weekend of solid work will get your bot in the top 500 (out of a little more than 3000 participants currently) and maybe even in the top 100. If you’re less experienced perhaps a week or two of work will get you the same (and if not, you will still learn a lot!).

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!

Progress

I have made very little progress since the last report, mainly due to the little time that was available to me. Only two things were done:

1 Progress

Since the last report I’ve added: a controllable spaceship, bullets, tentacles and I made an unsuccessful attempt at producing a Linux binary.

Introduction

I’ve finally managed to scramble together a good couple of hours to work on my ILGE 2010 entry. At this rate it will be doubtful whether I’ll have a minimal game by the end of this month :-(

cl2md is a quick hack inspired by pbook.el (which you should check out if you’ve never heard of it and are an Emacs user since it marks up the source code much nicer).

The page “cl2md” in the previous paragraph links to is the actual source code file which has been run through itself and a Markdown converter.

Sorry for the CamelCase but I didn’t come up with the names :-)

For those bitten by the game AI bug since the Google AI Challenge (all eleven of us) I’ve started working on a Common Lisp (CL) client for the StarCraft ProxyBot with the StarCraft AI competition in mind: http://github.com/aerique/cl-starcraft-proxybot.

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.

I’ve uploaded one-and-a-half project to GitHub that may or may not be useful to other people:

Black Tie packages the noise functions that were previously in Okra as a separate library. It is not very extensive yet and has only been optimized for SBCL. At the moment it includes functions for generating Perlin noise, simplex noise and Voronoi diagrams.

I was installing Debian (testing release) on a netbook since my main laptop is away for repairs and I noticed the Ogre packages in the distribution. So far I have always compiled Ogre and its dependencies myself so I was curious how much work it would take to get the Okra examples running.

Thanks to CL-GTK2’s author Dmitry Kalyanov for his help and patience and also thanks to several #lisp residents for testing some of my builds.

Go to ./software/okra-gtk-demo/ for the downloads.

This post should be treated more as a work-in-progress report[1] than as the blog I hoped I could publish, which would have had a title like: “Easy cross-platform executable delivery using CL-GTK2 and Okra”.

I have been using Okra for a couple of months now after having worked on it for a few weeks. Although “a couple of months” should be seen in the perspective of someone with a full-time job, a wife and a kid.

While researching avenues to do games and graphics programming from CL and while working on Okra I often had this Usenet thread from comp.lang.lisp on my mind: C++ to CLOS mapping.

There’s now an official “after-show website” with slides.

I’d first like to thank Arthur & Edi for a very well arranged meeting.

I attended all talks except for one (RacerPro) because I had to get a shot of coffee and some fresh air. This was due to my physical state at that time and isn’t meant as a slight against the talk. AFAIK, the ECLM 2009 didn’t have an official theme but if there was one recurrent theme it had to be multi-processing / distributed computing in Common Lisp. I’d say in at least four of the seven speeches it was an important of not the main theme of the talk while in another talk it was at least of some relevance.

I’ve saved executable images of SBCL and CCL on Windows and they’re available as http://www.xs4all.nl/~euqirea/downloads/okra-20090910.zip from the Okra project page.

This should make it easier for people on Windows to start playing with Okra since it comes with all the necessary libraries. Just double-click okra-sbcl.exe or okra-ccl.exe and you should be looking at a Common Lisp REPL with Okra installed. If you enter:

I asked this on #lisp but apparently it was the wrong time of the day since there were only a couple of trolls awake.

So, I’m aware threading is not supported for SBCL on Windows at the moment but what I don’t know is whether anyone is working or has been working on it recently. The best I could find on Google was a GSoC 2008 project by Elliot Slaughter. Now, I could try digging through the SBCL mailinglist archives on SourceForge, but Jesus Christ, I hate using that site since it is so unusable.

Since I was finally able to figure out why CEGUI wouldn’t work on Linux SBCL (thanks to pkhuong on #lisp) and since the Flock demo is more or less finished[1] I tagged the latest checkins of Okra and clois-lane and pushed them to Github.

Much to my surprise they stocked Practical Common Lisp at a local book store. The first edition even! That’ll look good besides my original On Lisp :-) That concludes today’s bragging.