Common Lisp Starter Package for Ant Wars

See the section after "Google AI Challenge Blurb" for information specific to this Common Lisp starter package.

Dependencies

The bot depends on a couple of 3rd party libraries that should have come with the starter package (in the 3rd-party directory).

Google AI Challenge Blurb

The files in this package are part of a starter package from the Google AI Challenge. The Google AI Challenge is an Artificial Intelligence programming contest. You can get more information by visiting www.ai-contest.com.

The entire contents of this starter package are released under the Apache license as is all code related to the Google AI Challenge. See code.google.com/p/ai-contest/ for more details.

There are a bunch of tutorials on the ai-contest.com website that tell you what to do with the contents of this starter package. For the impatient, here is a brief summary.

• In the root directory, there are a bunch of code files. These are a simple working contest entry that employs a basic strategy. These are meant to be used as a starting point for you to start writing your own entry. Alternatively, you can just package up the starter package as-is and submit it on the website.

• The tools directory contains a game engine and visualizer. This is meant to be used to test your bot. See the relevant tutorials on the website for information about how to use the tools.

• The example_bots directory contains some sample bots for you to test your own bot against.

Common Lisp Starter Package Specific Information

This rest of this file contains specific information about the Common Lisp (CL) starter package for the Ant Wars Google AI Challenge.

It is assumed you are using SBCL, since that is what the challenge server will be using as well. (Ubuntu Natty AMD64?)

Status

This bot is still in development and has only been tested locally with data on standard input. Nevertheless, patches and improvements are welcome.

Usage

Run bin/run-ants-bot.sbcl and paste the sample input from the Ants Game Specification.

There are also a few initial unit tests which can be run by issuing bin/run-tests.sh.

Submission Errors

If SBCL does any output on standard error (stderr / *error-output*) it will count as a compilation error to the server. So even innocuous compiler notes or warnings will cause a compilation error.

If you're running into this, redirect *error-output* to *standard-output* like so: (setf *error-output* *standard-output*) at the top of MyBot.lisp.

However, this will also hide genuine compilation errors that would otherwise be shown on your profile page! So if your bot still fails compiling on the server, your best best is resubmitting with the redirection disabled.

In the near future the proper incantation to disable warnings and notes on stderr will hopefully be added.

Tools

point out tools

CC=gcc

If running or compiling proxy-bot or play-game fails you need to put CC=gcc in front of the command: CC=gcc make proxy-bot. Where gcc is whatever C compiler you have installed on your system.

play-game

needs new description

Why another game engine?

I'm planning to build a bot in this challenge using genetic programming and for several reasons (all of which can be argued against) I wanted a native game engine:

• ease of deployment on multiple servers
• ease of programming
• performance

There's another reason which is that I will probably be using a lot of this engine's code for the next challenge's game suggestion. I want to have a running prototype of a game then.

Windows / MSYS Note

You're probably best of putting a symbolic link sbcl in /usr/bin pointing to wherever SBCL is installed on your system.

Platforms

The code has been tested on the following platforms:

• x86: SBCL 1.0.45.debian
• x86: Experimental SBCL 1.0.45 with threads for Windows using MSYS
• x86: SBCL 1.0.40 on an Ubuntu 10.10 VirtualBox image

Windows Note

If you're running Windows it is assumed you are running MSYS.

At the time of this writing if you're using Windows you must use the Clon package that comes with this example bot since it contains some fixes to make it work on SBCL on Windows. You could ofcourse check to see whether Clon has been updated in the meantime.