Ideas for the new A.I. league season?

AILeague
31

Some feedback for improvement opportunities from this season provided by users of all ages:

  • Game outcomes should not vary significantly due to being RED or BLUE. This was documented here (sorta). Likewise, many players 1v1’d opponents they had lost to in simulation and could not understand why given that they won from their perspective.
  • Game grids should not be subject to gamesmanship. This was detailed and exploited (with a white hat) by the BBA in this post during one student’s brief landing in the #1 spot when he was able to get to #1 spot by doing some skullduggery.
  • Game grids should not change during the competition. This was rather maddening to one player who had a very solid routine in place only to find it suddenly consistently die in the first 10 seconds by slamming into the wall. I realize this was made because of the above point, but at some point the game parameters should be locked.
    • A possible solution to this wall issue might be to have hitting the walls not necessarily be losing, but rather have players bounce off. While in a perfect world no parameters would be changed during season, at least in this case quality code would not suddenly be beaten by garbage loop codes that just go in a square.
  • Debugging. This is probably a topic that’s been brought up, and maybe there’s a method that is less known to users, but it is very frustrating to depend on the console log to debug variables. This is also not an accurate representation of what coding is in the “real world”. Nearly all coding environments have a way to run code through to a certain line with a list of variables and values assigned to them displayed.

Overall this AI combat concept is a fantastic platform for kids to problem solve, so I very much hope it continues. Unfortunately, the above issues did frustrate several kids to the point they did not engage in this season as much as in previous seasons. Hopefully, this feedback proves useful. I may reach out directly to a few individuals who appear to be admins in this process with offers to assist.

Thank You!

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