Jamie's Blog

I spent a few hours cooking up an entry for this Tron Bot AI Competition. The starter packages they provided made it really easy to enter. I created an entry in python. The competition page is: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/

The strategy for my bot:

1. I tried to implement painter’s flood fill per Wikipedia. This worked okay and I got to around ~300.
2. Then I implemented A*. The strategy was to get within 5 squares of the enemy, and then flood fill. My reasoning was that if I had a better fill algorithm, I would win at that point.
3. Next, I tried to implement minimax with alpha-beta pruning. It’s not tested, but it should be fairly close. All I am missing is a utility function (well, that is probably the most impt piece!). For the utility function, I wanted to bisect the playing field by finding the perpendicular bisector between the players, then flood-filling to determine the number of blank spaces in each player’s respective region. I have the bisection algorithm done, but got bored once I started implementing the flood fill.

The project page is, it contains the source as well: http://code.google.com/p/tron-bot-waterloo/

Bot runs:

This application was written primarily as an exercise in creating Facebook Applications. It was very instructive! Here is the project blog if you’d like more details http://thirteengame.blogspot.com/.

It is an adaptation of a web app I originally wrote in 2007. You may play either by logging into Facebook and trying it out, or logging in here http://www.angelforge.org/thirteen/LoginPage.php. To login outside of Facebook, you may either use the user name and password guest or login with your Facebook credentials using Facebook Connect.