Changes for 2012

This page is primarily for competitors familiar with last year's system, but newcomers will also find some useful information. Note that not all changes may be listed here; check the readme in the DevKit for latest details.

New Feature: Sprinting!

The major innovation this year is that bots can sprint, that is move more than one cell in an atomic operation. This will use less energy than moving one cell at a time, but running into a wall will be much more expensive.

Bots can only sprint forward, and the number of cells traversed has been fixed at 5. The cost will be 15 units of energy, which is half the normal cost of moving forward 5 times. Running into a wall while sprinting will cost 60 units, which is 5 times the cost of hitting a wall while moving normally.

Sprinting could make good use of the lookFarAhead method, but note that bots cannot look for the duration of a sprint. This may negatively impact exploration of the maze, so bots have to decide when it is appropriate to sprint.

Mazes

New Maze Type: Frilly Mondrian

This new maze type somewhat resembles the paintings by Mondrian composed of rectangular shapes and bold colours, except with all the rectangles filled with diagonal stripes.

Scala Support

We are now accepting submissions written in Scala as well as Java.

Improvements to Developer Tools

  • Eclipse is now supported natively.
  • The maze view now shows where your bot ran into walls, as red dots.
  • The bots list is automatically populated.
  • A drawing mode for making quad-symmetric mazes.
  • Batch logs now show statistics broken down by maze type.
  • A hack to fix poor GUI sizing on Linux and MacOS.

Changes from previous years

You can also read about the changes made in previous years: