Go Go GoBots!
Riddles.io is codesports platform where you write bots in a language of your choice to play games in one of their hosted competitions. I’ve written bots that play Texas Hold’em poker, Ultimate Tic Tac Toe, and other games. I was recently on vacation in Arizona where I wrote down some notes on making a bot to compete in their AI Block Battle game, which is a Tetris like competition. When I got home I coded a quick bot in C# to get the communications down and uploaded it to the site and then promptly forgot about it.
This week I checked on the bot and it had gone up to #9 in the standings, which surprised me. The only thing this bot does is clear lines, as fast as it can. The idea behind the heuristic is to stay alive as long as possible. This would be a good bot to test new versions of the bot against, but I did not think it would be in the top 10.
I think Go is a programming language that would work well for this type of competition. My original program did not search very deeply for best moves, but there is more that could be done to find the best fit current pieces. I’ve also been looking for a fun project to really get into the Go programming language, so I decided to make AI Block Battle bot in Go.
The initial version of the bot will be a survivor bot just like the C# version, with the purpose of verifying communication with the Riddles game engine. Once this bot is working well enough there are some improvements that are “low hanging fruit”. For each round in the game the bot is provide with not only the current piece that needs to be placed, but also the next piece that will come on the next turn. The C# bot did not make use of this knowledge, and I think in very few lines of code we can make the survivor bot survive a little bit longer.