Evolution of AMazeBot

The AMazeBot is less than a week away! The deadline for students to submit their bots is tomorrow, and the competition takes place on Wednesday. Even at this late stage I’ve been making some minor tweaks to the system, which has delayed me from describing all the major changes I made when I rewrote it last year. I’ll attempt to do so now.

The original Amazebot system consisted of only a single module that was used both for writing bots and in the competition show. This module was contained in a library that could not be run independently, instead relying on students’ code for the main function. A compiled Amazebot program would create a window with a maze, run the bot through it while drawing its path, and then exit writing the results to a log file. The mazes were procedurally generated based on a seed value which was obtained from an ini file. For the show, a script was prepared which, for each of the 5 rounds, did the following: modify the ini file to specify the seed for the round, execute each bot program in turn, and process the log file to create an HTML file showing the bot rankings.

This system worked adequately, but there were a number of deficiencies. The solutions to these resulted in the system being split into 3 modules, each described below.

AMazeBot

It’s been over 2 months since my last post! In that time my attention has mostly been devoted to the Amazebot programming competition. I’ve been doing several activities related to it: updating the software, running workshops for beginners, and designing a promotional T-shirt. When I discovered that I had a few hits from people searching for “amazebot” I felt I should capitalize on this. The competition takes place just a month from now, so perhaps it’s a bit late for that but at least this will all be in place and ready for next year!

The Amazebot is an annual competition run at Mohawk College, open to all students (though most entrants are from Software Engineering). Competitors must write a program that will navigate a virtual robot through given mazes as efficiently as possible. It was started in 2003 by Professor Mark Yendt, in an effort to show students a fun side of programming. The first 2 competitions were done in C++, and thereafter switched to Java.

While I was in college I entered 3 times, and (I must beg pardon for this boasting) I won first place all 3 times. It wasn’t all just talent though–I put a lot more time into it than most, and I believe that effort is what really paid off. Back then the system was rather primitive, both in terms of the tools provided for students to develop their bots, and the quality of the visual presentation during the competition itself. I had several ideas for improvement, and after I graduated Professor Yendt graciously allowed me to rewrite the software from scratch. My version was first used in the 2008 competition and was well received by both entrants and spectators. You can see the evolution of the system in these 3 screenshots:

2003

2005

2008

The basic concept has remained the same over the years though. The maze is constructed on a grid of 44 × 44 cells, each of which can be either open (floor) or closed (a wall). This is simpler to deal with than some other types of mazes, in which walls are drawn only between cells. Instead of escaping the maze, bots must attempt to reach a 4 × 4 cell goal room. A bot can perform a few different actions: it can move forward or backward, turn left or right, and look into the cell ahead or to either side of it. Each action costs a certain number of points–this represents energy that a real bot would have to expend to do anything. The challenge is that bots start out without any information about where the walls are–they are given only the location of the goal room. They must explore and discover the layout of the maze as they go along in order to find a path to the goal. There are 5 rounds in the competition (each a different maze) and bots with the lowest overall scores win.

I’m planning a series of posts to discuss in detail how the system works, new features I’ve introduced, and the competition itself. I’ll also offer tips and tutorials for students getting started.