This was a submission for the ICFP 2015 programming contest, from August 7 - 9, 2015. For more information see the specification page: http://2015.icfpcontest.org/
Team Play the VR game Bazaar! Coming soon to the Oculus GearVR store. www.templegatesgames.com @Temple_Gates #BazaarGame
- Ryan Ingram
- Jeff Gates
- Tod Semple
- Vu Ha
- Yee Cheng Chin
Our team was ranked 20th in the qualifying rounds, and 7th in the finals.
HELLO JUDGES!
Our solution is on Windows and requires (hopefully any version of) Microsoft Visual Studio to build. We are using Visual Studio 2010.
We have included a prebuilt binary of play_icfp2015.exe for your convenience.
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The program was developed on Windows, but we have included a Makefile for Mac and Linux as well.
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Start a Visual Studio command prompt (usually in All Programs > Visual Studio whatever > Visual Studio Tools > Visual Studio Command Prompt). The batch file supports command prompts of Visual Studio 2010, 2012, and 2013. Visual Studio 2015 should work too but is untested.
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cd to the directory with this README file
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Run make.bat
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The executable will be called play_icfp2015.exe in this directory!
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Run "make" in the root folder.
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The built executable will be called "play_icfp2015" in the root folder.
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We created several AIs that greedily choose moves according to a variety of criteria. We then use a genetic algorithm to try to find the best plan of which AI to use for each move.
We spend more time working on the current best plan but keep up to 20 plans available which can be worked on, to attempt to avoid local maxima.
We assume the judges will pass all appropriate "-p" parameters to our program; during development we found several power phrases, but the specification seems to say the judging process will inform our code of all known power phrases. (And that there are no more than 18)
We ignore the "-m" parameter, our solution pre-allocates almost all data structures.
Without the "-t" parameter our solution will run for 24 hours. We hope the judges will specify this parameter for all programs.
We currently ignore the "-c" parameter and run single threaded.
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Game.exe is our testbed tool, built with the Temple Gates XEngine. Code for this tool is in GameApp.cpp, but the project won't build without the engine (sorry!)
Keys are defined in GameInputHandle(), but here's a summary:
SPACE: Reset the game (and advance seeds if the problem has multiple seeds)
Q/E: Rotate A/D: Move sideways Z/C: Move downwards
The game will not let you play invalid 'stuttering moves'. This is somewhat unintuitive for human players :)
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1: Play a random move
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2: Let the current AI choose a move.
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n/m: Choose the current AI
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5: Reset the genetic AI for the current problem, seed 0
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6: Run one generation of the genetic AI
There are other key-commands defined, but they may summon the Old Ones. Tread carefully.