Making another AI bot

[Dotrar]

Hey guys

I saw the github link on one of the discord servers and this was the only repo on it. Seemed kinda cool and so I wanted to have a shot of making my own AI thing to brush of my C++ skills, I have literally not touched C++ since before C++11.

I added a .gitignore for all the intermediate files that get built by cmake when trying to use it.

If I'm stepping on anyone's toes, let me know. This PR is still a work in progess, I'm just opening up the conversation here. :)

let me know what you think

[Dotrar]

Also I can't seem to add labels, but I would've added something along the lines of [WIP - don't merge] or something just because it's still in progress.

[mitchell-merry]

I should've said something sooner! I love that you wrote something for this. Unfortunately this project didn't get as much traction as I'd hoped, since there aren't many people that were enthusiastic enough / had enough time to write something for it (it was in a trial phase). I love that you did do something with it though.

[Dotrar]

He, I just saw this GitHub profile linked through one of the discords, and this is the only repo here. :P

I think one bit that might make it a bit more friendly would be to have a visual implementation of the game so that people can see what the game is. I had to just Google it. (raised further questions as to why you're specifying cell x/y in output, because I don't think you can do that in the real game?)

I'd love to help out, and I could make a quick gui for it, but I'm a python developer primarily. 😅

I'd love the idea of having multiple games implemented, and people had to make competitive AI's for it. I only wanted to make my AI because I thought it would've got better results than the SimpleAI :p.

I'm in engineering (robotics) and originally from. Q.U.T. - I've built robotic simulators in pygame just as part of making actual AIs for robots.

I'm about to graduate soon, but I'd be keen to whip up some games and try to encourage some AI dev, could be really really fun. Thinking like, pygame interface and basic Cpp implementation? That should be enough to get some student interest.

What started this project?

[mitchell-merry]

The code was written to mimic a project from DSA, the Hex game. They're console based, so I was limited to ASCII, which obviously has it's limitations in a game like this. The reason I specify x/y is because I think it allows for more strategy (otherwise it's fairly simple imo, but still not sure)

Yes, I would love to have competitions for these things! That's what started the project, I had hoped to run some trials for this style of competition, and then we'd have people compete and such for things like board games (think chess, go, hex, etc), which would have prizes. Unfortunately what I've noticed in this university is a lack of enthusiasm from the general student base - at least from what I've experienced, there aren't many people that would be interested in enough to properly develop something like this over a long time and compete. Maybe it's covid, or maybe I've missed the mark, but I think it'd be difficult to drum up interest in something like this.

I think ideally it'd work if people got together and wrote the code together in person on one day - like if we booked a room out for a whole day and had a bunch of people coding in there, with real time competitive updates - a game that'd be easy to start writing code for, not too complex, and ideally in a format that wouldn't provide too many difficult-to-debug bugs (like c++ memory leaks for example). Alternatively, something like competitive programming (think Google Kickstart). But for those things to work we'd need to build up a culture for these things over a while.

So yes, this project was started with the hopes of trialing competitions like this. I also have access to make Claraworld problem sets, for the purpose of making a competition for that in the future, but I'm worried it has the same problems (this might be a good format for timed competitive coding though tbh!)