Round up of the Google AI Competition

Well the competition got a lot harder once the maps changed, the real top bots certainly rose to the top. Congratulations to the winners!

My reflections on the competition:

• Nicely run and nice that it adapted to the demands of the players
• Great to have the ability to watch the matches afterwards.
• Some very talented AI guys out there - with a fair bit of time on their hands.

My bot:

• Instead of doing a minimax on my move then the opponents move, it should have used the syncronous nature of movement to analyse the 9 (apart from the first move with all 4 directions available to both players) feasiable options.
• I would have ideally trimmed the resultant decision tree in a logical manner, searching deep on both sideways options and that would often beat the opposition, by adventagously cutting the areas.
• My initial implimentation of 'first to the most squares' was buggy, it would have been great to sort it out. so the bot didn't make such obvious bad moves.
• Using a more optimized 'first to most squares' algorithm. I should have made a list of the coordinates to go over in the next run, meaning that only 1-20 squares were checked rather than all squares.

I lacked the time to impliment these options, but that's no excuse, just the way it was. I had great fun and I'll be looking for the next challenge from the University of Waterloo CS Club.

I'll throw my code up here for anyone that wants a slightly buggy (but very fixable) tron bot.

In fact I have a few versions - one in perticular was stable but didn't search very deep.