Honeypot (under development)

Game Description

Disaster! The evil robot overlords have built an army of attack drones to terrorize the Earth. Humanity's only hope is an ingenious new automated battle tank designed to combat the new threat. After several months of frantic work, the tank's construction has finally been completed. Now all that remains is to program it to take on the robot army. That is where you come in.

The tank and drones move on a two-dimensional grid. Movement on the grid can only be done horizontally and vertically, and only one square at a time. Your job is to program the tank to seek out and destroy as many drones and other targets as possible before its fuel runs out. The exact capabilities of the attack drones are currently not known, but reverse-engineering has shown that they do not appear to be equipped with any ranged weapons and will have to get close to attack.

The tank is equipped with state-of-the-art technology. Its caterpillar tracks allow backward and forward movement, and 90-degree turns to the left and right. It has a forward-facing cannon, ready to fire at any enemy caught in the sights of the tank's highly advanced target identification system. In addition, the tank is equipped with a high-precision lidar system, to measure the distance to objects in its surroundings.

The tank is also equipped with a shield generator, and a low-consumption fuel cell. Moving around and firing the cannon consumes fuel, and being attacked by drones or hitting walls causes the shield generator to drain even more fuel. The lidar and target identification systems are solar powered and do not consume any fuel.

Task Overview

This game is about programming an AI for a tank to survive in a unfamiliar and hostile environment. You provide the AI by programming a function with the following type signature

playerStep :: Step Event

The Step Monad allows you to retrieve information about the surrounding and current state of the game, such as remaining fuel, and number of empty cells between the tank and obstacles

playerStep :: Step Event 
playerStep = do
  fuel <- currentFuel
  cell <- identifyTarget
  nr <- lidarFront
  -- do some calculations on the information
  let event = calculateEvent fuel cell nr
  return event

Step Monad Api

Inside the Step Monad you have access to the following functions:

Returns how much fuel the tank has left.

currentFuel :: Step Fuel

Returns the character of the cell infront of the tank.

identifyTarget :: Step Cell

data Cell = Empty
          | Wall
          | Block
          | Enemy

Measures the distance in squares to the nearest object infront/behind/beside the tank. Objects on a square directly adjacent to the tank will have a distance of 1. Lidar systems do not consume any fuel.

lidarFront, lidarBack, lidarRight, lidarLeft :: Step Int

Your desicion is reflected by the type of Event you return from the Step Monad. All event are associated with a fuel cost.

data Event = TurnLeft     -- 1 fuel
           | TurnRight    -- 1 fuel
           | MoveForward  -- 1 fuel
           | MoveBackward -- 1 fuel
           | Noop         -- 1 fuel
           | Shoot        -- 5 fuel