Botswana

As previewed a little while ago, I’d like to introduce Botswana:

A couple weeks ago at work I was talking with two of my coworkers and Core War came up somehow. I got excited about the idea of writing AI bots to compete with each other. Conferring with my friend Chad, we decided to make it web-based and use Javascript as the scripting language for both the bots and the game engine. A couple days later, we had a working engine, and we’ve been fine-tuning it since then.

Each turn, the engine sends the current state of the world to each bot. The bot can then give the engine its command — to move forward, move backward, turn left, turn right, or fire. Last bot standing wins. We’ve gone with an intentionally simple rule system for now, but we’ve got some fun plans for future improvements.

The code’s open source and is on Github.