|
|
|
Remember how HAL, the intelligent computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, whipped astronaut Frank Bowman's butt in chess and then went on to murder him and send his lifeless body hurtling across space? What lesson can we, as AI scientists, draw from these tragic events? Never play computer chess.
So what shall we play?
We shall play Sockey... Robosockey!
A millenium ago, the great wizard Mike Wessler brought forth Robosockey. It was the era of heroes, superheroes! And the people played and some won and some lost. And then the game lay fallow until a new era arrived.
Strangely like Robosockey of yore. In fact, entirely similar. Robosockey is a Java soccer game. Every participant writes a team of players who will compete in the final tournament. Each team (in fact, each person), can submit as many teams as they wish.
Documentation on writing a team has been thoughtfully provided by Mr. Wessler.
Robosockey was developed to run on Java 1.1.8, the version supported by most web browsers. Please restrict yourself to the 1.1.8 API. Your best bet for trying out your teams in a web browser is to use Internet Explorer on Windows or MacOS. Netscape seems to work on Windows, but not on Linux. On Linux, various JDKs are installed under /com/linux-local/. If you need to download a JDK, go to http://java.sun.com/ for Sun JDKs (Windows, Solaris, and Linux) and pointers to ports for other platforms.
Compiling with a newer JDK is fine, so long as you run your code against a 1.1.8 version. Running with the latest version 1.3 on Linux, for example, seems to produce problems with the graphic updates that causes the code to run extremely slowly. On other platforms, who knows? Your mileage may vary. I am trying to develop fixes to make everything run smoothly under 1.3. If I am successful I will make an announcement to the Olympics 2001 mailing list.