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PHP Contest: Revenge of the Apple Eating Robots
Zack Coburn writes "The latest Codewalkers' PHP Coding Contest invites PHP programmers to write a script in PHP to interface with a judging library and play 'Apple Eating Robots,' a game based on the classic Unix console game called Robots. According to the contest description, the goal is 'to avoid robots, eat apples, and kill robots by forcing them to hit each other in order to get the highest score.' For judging, 'at least 100 rounds will be played. In the end, the sum of all points earned will determine the winner. In the case of a tie, the running time will be the tie-breaker.' According to an e-mail sent out to Codewalkers users, 'The
PHP Coding Contest is now in its third year since inception and touts $2,000 worth of prizes. The first ten places will earn a prize, so even if you
aren't the top winner, you have a chance at winning something.' Prizes for the current contest include Macromedia Studio MX, Zend Studio, PHPEd, and SourceGuardian Pro."
Heck, I know sources I can get the prize for free... offer something tangible why don't you.
Well, name recognition would be in it too, I guess. So one might be able to get a job coding PHP. Although, the standard things PHP is used for doesn't exactly require advanced AI-beating algorithms, it's more boring and tedious representation of data -- "wow, a forum, with comments..."
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
sod writing in code in assembler, its PHP from now on !!, all those big companies use it like Eba.. no Amazo.. uhm uhm well my friend uses it on his blog
Well, let's hope all they want is a little revenge, and not their come-uppence.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
..are there any good free PHP debuggers yet?
1 month free hosting from TheHostingCompany.us. (Platinum Package)
How exactly is this a prize? What are you going to do, cancel with your current ISP, transfer your website over to this place, wait a month, sign back up with your original ISP again, and transfer back?
One year's hosting, that would be a prize. One month? That's not a prize--that's a burden (and, obviously, just a promotional gimmick).
I hereby announce my own set of prizes for the 11th through the 20th place contestants. Each person placing 11th through 20th will have one free week's rent in an apartment, selected by me, on the opposite side of the country from their current residence, under the conditions that (1) they move all of their furniture in and unpack everything they own completely before the week is up, (2) they pack everything back up and move all of it back out by 5:00 PM the final day, (3) they sell their current residence to someone they don't know, and (4) they buy back their old place after the week is up.
As an alternative, I will also permit the winners to remain in their new apartments, AS LONG AS they pay me a $1000 stipend every six weeks.
Good luck, everybody!
1. Avoid robots
2. Eat apples
3. PROFIT!
it's usually distributed as part of a collection called "bsd games", if you use Linux try here.
ex$$
They tried having them eat mushrooms, but after a few, the results became unpredictable. Some started playing some nonsense tune about badgers, others just quietly exploded.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm not sure that the Unix robots was the first such game. Wasn't there an Apple II commercial game that sparked it all off? After that, there were variants everywhere. (There was even an HP3000 version that used a RPN Forth-like language.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
No sig for you.
I'm a big fan of PHP, but is this really the best usage for this language?
;). Python has a simple syntax and a standard GUI library, along with scores of additional modules for graphics, sounds, and almost anything else you can think of. I don't want to sound like I'm evangelizing python, but is this contest really the best test of ones PHP skills?
This is a game, so ideally, some real-time graphical output would be nice. Yet isn't that not the nature of PHP? PHP's web-centric, so you're usually generating html. If I wanted to write a game that has to run continuously I'd write it in a general purpose programming language like python (or c++ if I was feeling masochistic
Okay.. You only have 9 possible moves. So on each turn, you run through all your possible moves, one at a time. After each move you can make, you calculate what the robots will do (since this is known), and then make a choice.
-If a move will get you killed, you eliminate it as a possibility.
-If all moves will get you killed, you teleport and hope for the best.
The only real choice is when you have more than one move that will keep you alive, and just a few rules can make this fairly obvious on what to do.
-If all the robots are in line with you and there's a scrap pile between them and you, stand your ground. They'll eventually run into the scrap.
-If a move will make robots collide, bump it up in priority a bit. Bump collisions that eliminate robots that are closer to you higher than collisions happening far away.
-If a move will bring robots closer to each other on the same line, bump it up in priority a bit, because this sort of thing will eventually cause them to collide. Give extra priority to bringing together robots that are closer to you, because scrapheaps closer to you protect you from robots further away from you.
-If a move will get you closer to any robots, lower it in priority a bit, because you want to keep your distance when possible. This should be less than the above priority adjustment because to bring robots together you need to have them on opposite sides of you, either vertically or horizontally.
Once you've done that, you pick the move with the highest priority. Then it's just a matter of tweaking these priority adjustments by hand until you find one that works good.
Apples are a null factor. The only way it states to end the game is to kill all the robots, and it says you get all the remaining apples after that anyway. So going after them is pointless with the rules as written. If getting all the apples also ends the game, then that's something else to consider as a factor, and makes it a bit more complicated.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Am I the only one who can't access the site at the moment? I already have a script mostly made thank you google chache) and would like to test it... Would someone mind emailing it to me/mirroring it?
a+b=c 4a-3a+4b-3b=4c-3c 4a+4b-4c=3a+3b-3c 4(a+b-c)=3(a+b-c) 4=3