Tournament Main

Tournament

First Annual Bot Challenge: Survivor Braitu

DCL Linux Lab, 11:00 AM, Tuesday March 15, 2005

Here's the March 05 Tournament Bracket with the final standings.

Student-designed bots compete head-to-head to survive five days and five nights in the toxic undertow of Braitu island. Who has the brains to survive? Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. The tournament scenario is shown below. Features include:

day/night cycles (competition duration: 3 days/nights)
tasty, yellow food bits that grow in sunlight (no food added at night)
a patch of purple toxin (nasty stuff, stay away)
some nice green plants near the bottom (resting?, hiding?)
a light intensity gradient during the day (brightest in the upper right corner)
a temperature gradient (warm at the surface, cool at the bottom),
an undertow current that slowly pulls idle bots out to sea (toward lower left)

Tournament Structure

Bots will compete head-to-head to survive five days and five nights in the toxic undertow of Braitu island. Each round will start with 15 bots of each color (red, green, blue, orange). Your controller code will be assigned to one of the colors. The 'Braitu island' scenario will run for 300 seconds of simulation time. The top two controllers (out of each group of four) will move forward into the next round of competition. The ranking of the four controllers is determined by the number of bots of each color remaining after 300 seconds; if some bots die out before 300 seconds is up, the ranking reflects the order in which they died out (i.e. the first to go extinct gets the lowest ranking in that round).

In the first round of the competition, the red bots will be controlled by the 'house bot' (HOUSE RED) and the other three colors will be controlled by student controllers. In subsequent rounds, the 'house bot' will be used only to balance out uneven groups as necessary.

After the initial round, there will be a 'Sweet Sixteen' competition (four groups of four bots), followed by an 'Elite Eight' (two groups of four bots), followed by the 'Final Four' (one group four bots). The winner of the 'Final Four' competition will be the 2005 Survivor Braitu champion!

Homework scoring

It's possible to score up to 7 points on this week's assignment (up to 2 points of extra credit)! Your homework grade will be determined as follows:

+3 points for turning in a working controller on time
+1 'style' point for turning in well-commented Matlab code
+1 'performance' point for being able to out-compete the house bot (details below)
+1 for making it into the 'Elite Eight'
+1 for making it into the 'Final Four'

The 'performance' point will be automatically awarded to all bots making it into the 'Elite Eight'. For those that didn't make it that far, there will be a separate one-on-one assessment against the HOUSE RED bot (15 red bots, 15 of your bots) for 300 seconds. Ling will carry out this assessment separately from the main tournament.

Programming restrictions

You cannot make use of any global variables. You can only use information that is passed to your controller code through the function arguments.

GOOD LUCK AND HAVE FUN!!!.