Tournament Bot

The purpose of this assignment is to test your AI implementation skills by developing a winning entry in the Raven tournament on Tuesday.

N.B. Late homework submissions will be graded in the usual way (see homework instructions), but will not be eligible for the tournament.

• The tournament will be four-round single-elimination. Each round will include two student bots and Buckland's bot. The map will be similar, but not identical, to the default map in Buckland's code.

• Each match will be five minutes. If there is a simulation failure during the match, it will be restarted.

• If there is a tie score, the lowest CPU time wins. (In the unlikely event that CPU times are identical, winner will be determined by coin toss.)

• The match winner is determined by combining the goals scored with a bonus of one to the loser for each 20% of winner's CPU time that loser conserves. For example,
  • Team A scores 4 points / uses 12.053 CPU secs
  • Team B scores 3 points / uses 9.109 CPU secs
  • Team B's score is increased by 5 * (12.053 - 9.109) / 12.053 = 1.2
  • Team B therefore wins with score of 4.2

• One bonus point will be added to your final course grade for every round your team wins (maximum four points).

What to Turn In

Changes you have made to Buckland's code should be marked with "//*" comments.

Grading

3 points - Bot plays full match without crashing.
• 3 points - Bot plays full match without exhibiting obviously buggy behavior (such as a player getting stuck in a corner, going in circles, never moving, etc.)

• 2 points - Bot almost always beats Buckland's and Burke's bot.

• 2 points - Software engineering quality (modularity, comments, coding style)

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Robin Burke for allowing the reuse of this assignment.