COMBAT XB COMPETITION

[+Vorticon]

10 hours ago, SteveB said:

This sounds very much like a challenge for 2024 ...  The Revenge of the Humiliated Tanks.

 

I am actually mulling the idea of a tank combat competition 2.0 for 2024, which could incorporate Tursi's ideas as well as finer turning and shooting, i.e. diagonal movement and fire possible. I'm also thinking about the option of laying down mines as well. This would make things a lot more interesting (and challenging!). There is also the possibility of differential damage where a kill requires 3 hits frontally, 2 on the sides and only 1 in the back. So a tank with 2 frontal hits and 1 hit on each side would remain operational, while a single rear hit would immediately kill it. Finally, there will be a small but definite probability of a miss proportional to range, and under such conditions ammo supply becomes a huge factor.

Hmmm.... The programming juices are starting to flow 😁

[Tursi]

19 hours ago, retrodroid said:

Simply amazing. Is anyone else kind of put off by the colloquial nature of ChatGPTs responses? I feel like it would be more appropriate if it didn't enact a humanistic conversational tone but simple returned the results without the "flourish". It really intentionally blurs the lines between interacting with a very sophisticated bot vs something more sentient, which can only lead to confusion around what's really going on by the users.

I first instructed it not to do that anymore, and it got better. Then I got bored and told it to respond to everything in the voice of Skeletor, and that made me much happier.

 

[+OLD CS1]

12 hours ago, Tursi said:

Then I got bored and told it to respond to everything in the voice of Skeletor, and that made me much happier.

Cobra Commander and Starscream also good choices.

[Tursi]

Here's the JAVA version that my buddy is presenting to his class.

 

[+Vorticon]

Incidentally, for those of you who enjoy this type of exercise, there is a game called Omega from Origin published in the 80's for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, C64, and Apple 2 systems which was a programmer's wet dream where you build and program a tank which you then pit against other opponents, computer controlled or user defined. It was quite sophisticated and challenging. I had initially bought it new when it first came out for DOS, but never really got very far with it. I again picked it up a couple of weeks ago and this time really dug into the thick manual and finally beat it by passing the highest clearance level. Thought I'd mention it. The game and manual can be found on the Abandonia site and others.

 

[+TheBF]

This is off topic because it's in Forth but I thought someone might find it interesting.

I had been working on a test bench with @Vorticon 's Tank combat design.

 

He and I are familiar with a little text called "Projects in Machine Intelligence for Your Home Computer",  Heiserman  (c) 1982 

(not the same meaning as today)

 

Anyway I wondered how effective something the book calls "Alpha-Intelligence" would be at dispatching tanks on the screen.

Here is the algorithm in Forth.

: ALPHA-BRAIN 
   RND-HEADING     
   BEGIN 
      PRINT.TANK 
      LOOK-AHEAD BKG = 
      IF 
        ADVANCE  
      ELSE 
        RND-HEADING 
      ENDIF 
   AGAIN 
;

 

I finally got around to creating a working framework to explore this and to play with the ideas written up here as well. 

The video shows one ALPHA-BRAIN hunter and 9 slower alpha-tanks with no defense and one fast tank.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Now I will create some different types of offensive and defensive thingys for the other guys. 

 

 

 

Edited October 12, 2023 by TheBF
typo