Google's AI Challenge

It is that time of year again that Google is sponsoring an AI challenge - It's a standard affair, you have to controll a set of ants and collect food and eventually defeat other ant hills, but its good fun and always a good opportunity to play around programming in a more competitive environment.

Full details are here, you can download the starter pack and get started in lots of programming languages, but unsuprisingly I have gone with Java for now - once you have the pack downloaded, they have some steps they recommend to get your ants doing the basics well, although you will obviously want to go beyond this minimum set, its a good chance to get your head around the object model and the APIs that are provided as standard.

I have just started this today and have completed the first 4 steps of the walkthrough, so not even started thinking about personal tactics and strategy.. so expect some posts to follow with those.

In the meantime, I am, as always, keeping my code on GitHub, so feel free to have a poke around how I have implemented the various steps in my code (only the first step of the tutorial is implemeneted in Java at the moment, the others are all currently in Python, so does require the slightest bit of imagination)