Impressions on B1 Machine

[Mitch Bradley]

That would be really cool.  And if the element of cooperation could be 
added, thus avoiding the implicit "every man for himself" lesson, it 
would be even better.  "team vs. problem" instead of "human vs. human".


Ivan Krstić wrote:
> Mitch Bradley wrote:
>   
>> Which suggests to me that it would be better to have a compelling game
>> that people like to play as-is, and make it easy to make simple mods
>> without having to first learn a complex framework.
>>     
>
> This reminds me...
>
> I don't know if anyone here remembers the Cybug system, (I think now
> called 'A. I. wars'). It was a game that had me hooked many years ago,
> with a very simple idea: you write a little robot in a scripting
> language that lets you sense robots around you, move around, and shoot.
> Then you pit your (fully autonomous, pre-programmed) robot against
> either other robots that came programmed with the game environment, or
> against other human-programmed robots in live tournaments.
>
> This was pretty tremendous fun, because you could run the game out of
> the box by pitting pre-programmed robots against one another, then look
> at how they work, change a single line, start another match, and so
> forth, eventually getting to the point where instead of modifying an
> existing robot, you write your own from scratch.
>
> In terms of kid appeal, I taught the Cybug system to 7th and 8th graders
> with no previous programming knowledge, and they got incredibly deeply
> into it.
>
> I think it'd be *fantastic* if someone wanted to take up an
> implementation of a cybug-like system in Python, with a subset of Python
> as the robot implementation language. There's an IAP class at MIT,
> 6.370, that does the same thing under the name 'RoboCraft':
>
>     http://battlecode.mit.edu/2007/info
>
> They even do fancy things like give robots 'fuel' which is used to pay
> for executing Java VM instructions, so that robots have to make careful
> assessments of when it pays to do more complex calculations. Someone
> could really go crazy with a system that does this on the OLPC.
>
>