Robocom: a game for programmers | Hacker News Reader

Robocom: a game for programmers

robocom.rrobek.de

29 pointsjamii16 comments

If you're into this kind of thing, you should check out Battlecode (http://www.battlecode.org). It's primarily an MIT competition, but in recent years we've opened it up to the general public. Also, several YC alums are former devs.

> Your goal is to put the other robots out of action. But not with weapons!

Hey! What's the fun in that? :P

It was a disappointment to check the downloads page and discover that there isn't anything other than a windows version available.

EDIT: It does seem to run on wine.

Hi, I'm the guy who invented RoboCom back in 97. Yes, RoboCom Workshop is Windows only (unfortunately), but there is a compatible interpreter named RoboTour which has been ported to various OS. It's not at fancy as RoboCom Workshop but it basically does the same.

The most exciting news about RoboCom is that I have started to re-write RoboCom as a web application in pure JavaScript (actually CoffeeScript). It runs in any modern web browser. The compiler and the simulator core both somewhat work, but it's very early alpha. The thing is that I have currently no time to continue the development because I founded a company which keeps me super-busy... but expect it to happen some day :)

It's some kind of Core Wars clone, right?

There are similarities, but it's a very different game. Robocom takes place on a 2D grid, and more resembles a fight between microorganisms. Each bot has its own individual memory banks, but these can be overwritten by other bots. So you might inject an instruction into an enemy to tell it to die, but a more effective strategy might be to instruct the enemy bot to infect others for several turns and then die.

News hasn't been updated there since 2009..

With all the 0x10C stuff that has been produced lately, I remembered I saw a game where you have to program AI to battle your opponents, but I couldn't remember the name.

Now I may have something to do :)

This is the general category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_game

Maybe it's robocode? http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

Not quite, it ran on DOS and was coded in an assembly-like language. Chances are it actually was robocom.

Oh wow, I used to tinker with this back in high school. Unfortunately, I could never convince my friends to join in, and I eventually lost interest. I'm impressed that it's still around.

Linux version would be nice.

It runs perfectly under wine.

Karel.turnRight();

That was honestly my first thought when I read about this. I could see Mehran playing this in his spare time. It would be a pretty great end-of-semester project too, having a competition like this in the class. Everyone would know Java, but they would have to learn a new language by building off what they already know.

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