Frequently Asked Questions

A Non-students or students outside of Ontario cannot enter the competition, but anyone is free to download the DevKit and write their own bot.

If you are a Mohawk alumnus you may enter a bot just for fun as a non-competitor. You would not be eligibile to win prizes but you'd get to see your bot and your name up on the big screen.

A We would certainly be pleased to have others use our system to run their own competitions! Since the tools are freely available, anyone can use them as they wish. However, if you contact us before running your own competition, we may be able to provide some assistance, and possibly even make available our competition module (which is not otherwise publicly available).

A Yes, in fact this is a fundamental part of the AI required for reliably and efficiently solving mazes. The exact way you do this is up to you. The outline of one possible approach can be foudn in the tutorial section of the website.

A Yes. Most of the procedurally generated mazes have some patterns which can be exploited, and it is fine to try to guess which maze type the bot is in and adjust behaviour accordingly. However because the custom maze is completely unknown, bots still need a good general algorithm that performs well on any maze type. Maze-specific tweaking should be done after the bot is already working well. It's not really something beginners should worry about, but it is definitely a technique used in high levels of competition.

There is a special debugging mode that allows you to step through your code interactively in the IDE, and see the bot's position updated in the GUI. You can examine the values of variables and see exactly what your bot is doing, and where it goes awry. This technique will be covered in a workshop, and we'll eventually have a tutorial as well.

If your bot is crashing the exceptions will be recorded in the bot's log file, and will indicate the line of code that caused the crash. You can also output your own diagnostic information to this log to help you track down where the problem lies.