Team Monkeys 2002 submission

Code

Here it is, some unimpressive poorly written java code [tarball].

The simian gang

• Mohammed Ajmal
• Aly Merchant
• Zaid Mian
• Peter Plachta

Concept (from the readme)

Our robot was coded entirely in Java. Our strategy relies heavily on so-called "Points of Interest". Clearly, given the limited information available to us throughout the game, certain decisions had to be made regarding how important we consider different aspects of the game and how much these aspects should figure into our strategy. In the end, we decided on several POIs (ex: Home Bases, the destinations of all packages that we're carrying, etc.) and then, had a fitness function for each of these POIs that would assign it a score, based on certain factors (ex: How far we are from the POI, how many points we get for delivering this POI (assuming it's a package), "hunting" mode vs. "delivering" mode, etc.)

Next, the coefficients for the formulae used in the fitness functions were determined using a genetic algorithm. We played off 10 robots, and then kept the 4 that obtained the highest score, mutated some of their genes and produced another 6 and repeated this process. In this way, by tweaking the coefficients properly, we would always tend to the most beneficial POI. Of course, this is glossing over many of the details of the project, but our hope is that this somehwat explains the thoughts behind our robot.