Sneaky Golem

golem

Inspiration

We wanted to win the tron game and felt like we had a strong strategy that could perform well

What it does

The program performs a floodfill but also constructs an escape tunnel such that after floodfilling as much area towards the opponent as possible, the floodfill algorithm escapes through the tunnel and traps the opponent while also trying to stay alive

How we built it

Trial & error, implementing floodfill algorithm, playing lots of tron in the meantime

Challenges we ran into

the program kept running into a wall so we had to convince it to not run into a wall, which took a surprising amount of time. We also had to deal with the possibility of the opponent floodfilling in the other direction and infiltrating the tunnel.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

reliably defeats our versions of floodfill and other miscellaneous strategies

What we learned

sometimes the simplest algorithms can be the most powerful, and slight adjustments to them may make them extremely powerful. In this case, floodfill beat most of our original algorithms, but we realized that most basic floodfills did not take the opponent existing into account, and that we would be able to leverage that naivety to our advantage.