applets/kicker.html

   1 <html>
   2 <head>
   3         <title>Kicker Bots</title>
   4         <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../styles.css"/>
   5 </head>
   6 <body>
   7 <div id="content">
   8         <h2>Kicker Bots</h2>
   9         <h3>Agent Algorithm</h3>
  10         <p>
  11                 A kicker agent chooses a visible ball at random and accelerates
  12                 towards it. If no ball is visible the agent sets his acceleration
  13                 to zero.
  14         </p>
  15         <h4>Pseudocode</h4>
  16         <div class="pseudocode">
  17 <pre>visibleBalls = {}
  18 for all visibleObjects
  19    if visibleObject is ball
  20       visibleBalls <-- visibleObject
  21 if visibleBalls is not empty
  22    ball = selectRandom(visibleBalls)
  23    accelerate towards ball
  24 else
  25    set acceleration to zero</pre>
  26         </div>
  27         <h3>Observed Behavior</h3>
  28         <p>
  29                 Since a kicker agent doesn't remember which ball he's
  30                 accelerating towards from one moment to the next, if he can see
  31                 multiple balls (e.g. if Number of Balls or Agent Sight is set high),
  32                 he will appear to have a pretty short attention span, since
  33                 the ball he will chose balls randomly each time.
  34         </p>
  35         <p>
  36                 The ceasing to accelerate strategy works well when a ball goes
  37                 out of sight, because chances are the agent was accelerating in the
  38                 same direction as the ball at last sighting, and an agent without
  39                 acceleration will bounce around the board just like the ball. To
  40                 see this, turn down the Agent Sight to around 10 or 15, so that if
  41                 there's another agent between him and the ball, an agent probably
  42                 won't be able to see the ball.
  43         </p>
  44         <p>
  45                 If there are too many agents or too few balls, the agents will
  46                 end up trapping the balls in the corners and the game ceases to be
  47                 interesting.
  48         </p>
  49         <h3>The Applet</h3>
  50         <applet archive="../dist/appletbots.jar"
  51                 code="appletbots.balls.BallsApplet"
  52                 alt="Kicker Applet"
  53                 width="600"
  54                 height="450">
  55                 <div>
  56                         If you see this, you need to either enable java, or install the Sun Java
  57                         Virtual Machine in your browser. To do so,
  58                         <a href="http://java.sun.com/getjava/download.html">click here</a>.
  59                 </div>
  60         </applet>
  61         <h3>Source Code</h3>
  62         <ul>
  63                 <li>
  64                         <a href="../src/BallsApplet.java.html">BallsApplet.java</a>
  65                 </li>
  66                 <li>
  67                         <a href="../src/Ball.java.html">Ball.java</a>
  68                 </li>
  69                 <li>
  70                         <a href="../src/Kicker.java.html">Kicker.java</a>
  71                 </li>
  72         </ul>
  73         <a href="../" class="return">Back to the Applet Bots Home</a>
  74 </div>
  75 <div class="official">
  76         The official version of this file is at <a href="http://applet-bots.sourceforge.net/applets/kicker.html">applet-bots.sourceforge.net</a>
  77         <a href="http://sourceforge.net" class="sf-logo"><img border="0" alt="SourceForge.net Logo" src="http://sflogo.sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=205988&amp;type=1"/></a>
  78 </div>
  79 </body>
  80 </html>