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TheSpaceGame — Design Your Route To Jupiter
An anonymous reader writes "The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of 'The Space Game,' an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes."
It can make the Jupiter run in less than twelve parsecs.
This is exactly the kind of combinatorial optimization problem that is superbly well-suited for solution by software and quite possibly the last kind of problem you want to hand to a bunch of humans, unless those humans happen to be programmers with backgrounds in celestial mechanics, heuristics, and genetic algorithms.
As a way of driving public interest in the ESA's space program, it's not a bad idea at all, but if any of its users manage to come up with a better solution than the ESA's software, it's not a triumph for crowdsourcing, it's a sign that the ESA needs to hire new programmers.
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I was going to bash this and say they could just take the money and feed random trajectories in to the formula and get the same results, but I got to thinking, this is actually good. This can give you the top 100 or so options then you spend the cpu time tweaking this or that variable. You may actually get some better results that doing raw multivariable calculus with a lot of variables and unknowns could do.
Crowdsourcing for this may be a good bit of publicity, but is really just wasting time.
A genetic algorithm running on their "simulation" will find the best solution within the accuracy of the parameters very quickly. Run a couple of times to make sure it is the global minimum and you're done.
Their competition has a hard limit on mission duration and the goal is minumum delta-v, so the fitness function is very easy to define.
If anyone wants to win the competition, figure out how to write parameters to their simulation and read the delta-v and mission duration, run a GA for a while and you automatically win.
... the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant ...
This seems like a trivial thing to do. At escape velocity give engines a little burst, coast to the orbit of the destination, a little burst to decelerate, wait for the planet to get to that point. OK, its not very efficient with respect to time but that wasn't a stated criteria. Game design is hard, even for rocket scientists.
Chemical rockets just aren't a great option- at least let us use an ion engine, or perhaps let us see what we can do with a VASMIR?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I mean, anything beyond jupiter would be a challenge. But jupiter itself? Hohmann transfer orbit, maybe with a sling around mars (would give very very low boost in deltaV, so not worth the launch window constrains IRL but ok for this)...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Uh, I think so, Brain, but we'll never find a slingshot that's big enough.
You didn't need that DNA intact, did you?
Yes! it is like the old "How to carve a ship" bit... "Take a block of wood, and carve away anything that doesn't look like a ship!"
In other words, "just do it"...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Game design is hard. Let's go shopping!
So instead of "handicapping" yourself, you assume lightspeed travel and simplify the problem to a linear trajectory. Bravo?
If we assume a Bergenholm inertialess drive , we can be at Jupiter in SECONDS!
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... the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant ...
This seems like a trivial thing to do. At escape velocity give engines a little burst, coast to the orbit of the destination, a little burst to decelerate, wait for the planet to get to that point. OK, its not very efficient with respect to time but that wasn't a stated criteria. Game design is hard, even for rocket scientists.
Oops, I think I got that mixed up a little. IIRC its accelerate to maintain the destination's orbit, deceleration would be to get captured by the destination itself.
I'm very confused why a computer couldn't just iterate through millions of iteration of the equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert's_problem) and pick the best.
Heck you could even use my old game: http://code.google.com/p/exoflight/
is zero. Just need to get the right vehicle for that, i.e. one that looks like a monolith full of stars.
...a release of slingshot implementation in HTML5?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
we should be rethinking the assumptions here.
Yes like what is best? I think the best path is to instead spend the resources to build space stations that generations of humans can actually live and reproduce on practically.
Then we can even have humans visiting Jupiter, Venus, Mars etc. No need to rush.
Plus we would then have the basic building blocks for large space colonies, which buys the human race some more time.
It sounds very similar to a game that was described in The Peace War by Vernor Vinge.
-John Fenley
...the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant.
I hate to be pedantic, but is the objective to arrive at Jupiter WITH the lowest amount of propellant, or is the objective to arrive at Jupiter USING the lowest amount of propellant? I suggest there is a big difference between the two.
Impetuous! Homeric!
For the competition journey. What's a good figure?
Didn't we already do this, with a penguin? http://www.bigideafun.com/penguins/arcade/spaced_penguin/default.htm
I got 16.98km/s, which at the time was 9th in the rankings. It was of course quickly pushed off; #10 right now is 15.91km/s. Johannes Schnabl has had the top spot with 10.67km/s the whole time I've been looking. I wonder if he's one of these geniuses upthread running a GA?
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Check out Orbiter - without a doubt the most realistic (and incredible) space flight simulator around. My little brother has basically taught himself orbital mechanics using Orbiter and online tutorials for the game (if you can call it that!) The real deal - Hohmann transfer orbits and spaceflight mechanics-type concepts I'd never heard of.
When I saw "the space game", I thought for sure they were talking about Orbiter. If "designing your own route to Jupiter" is something you're interested in, do yourself a favour and check it out.
Sephiroth had a very efficient method to find the shortest path to Jupiter.
If we assume teleporters, it wouldn't even take a second. Therefore my completely unrealistic solution is much better than your completely unrealistic solution.
p.s. "a few radians" is actually quite a lot. There's only 2 Pi of them in an entire circle. "a few radians" means atleast two radians, which is over 114 degrees. And we could "give or take" them, so it's ~114 degrees in either direction for a total range of ~229 degrees. Far from a straight line
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You'd have to do it in two launches, it won't work with only one.
The first launch needs to terminate with significant mass at many miles per second in Washington D.C. prior to the Jupiter launch in order to prevent the whole Jupiter project being killed halfway through planning.
Hey, just sayin'.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Although I work in the Space Industry I am not a Rocket Scientist but it is my understanding that this is *not* a purely computer solvable problem and is explained on the GTOC website: http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/op/GTOC/indexII.htm
So basically just avoid the other planets along the way, and go the slowest speed imaginable?
Precisely. The trick is to cross your fingers and imagine that you're already there, then by the power of New Age BS everything will magically fall into place.
Teleporters? Pshaw!
Wormholes is the way to go. Just step across and you're 4000 miles deep in Jupiter's Red Storm.
I drank what? -- Socrates
in the challenge, everytime i get the delta-v low (around the 22-25 mark), i'll end up moving one planet slightly wrong and the game just completely changes the trajectories and i'll have to spend another ten minutes tweaking it down to 25 again...
nice idea and all, but the implementation just annoyes me enough to give up after a few tries
People, what a bunch of bastards
now just to go in the garage and find that warp pod i salvaged from the Ur-Quan dreadnought that crashed in my backyard.
/. posters. -> buy some fuel
Prerequisites: start with 0 fuel.
Step 1:hit quasi space and arrive as close as possible to our destination. (so far we have used 0 fuel.)
Step 2: use Umgah Caster to call Google employees, sell data on behaviour of
Step 2b: proceed to destination.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
Set buttocks to stun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYBRfFVPZ3w
I keep somehow expecting scientists to discover some new wrinkle of the universe that shows us that Douglas Adams might have been right after all.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."