malgorithms

I can assure you I'd never sue someone for stealing trade secrets. Whatever "trade secrets" means in software, anyway.

I wish I knew someone who used Opera so I could ask them to start boycotting it.

This is uncertain. The game steps at a specific rate (the physics is deterministic) but does not wait for callbacks from your AI to proceed with the game. If a specific ship hasn't replied to the last request for instructions, the game won't call it the next round. I was thinking that rather than providing the game step in the API, the simplest thing is for an AI to study the gametime and draw its own conclusions.

The browser version runs in a WebWorker (each team gets one). I didn't even know what WebWorkers were before I programmed this. The server side runs in a NodeJS process (each team gets its own), and your code runs in a fresh VM context. These both provide commonly expected JS such as Math and Date, but not other stuff such as console (which I provide in the webworker case and send messages back to the browser).

They matter in that they might ram you :-). You also have another ship's moment of inertia, which tells you something about it. But no, you're not provided other ships' geometries. I could change this, but likely not during the contest.

That's a function in one of the sample codes I wrote, so it should be in the same file you encountered it. It likely uses some of the lib functions defined on the documentation page.

You are free to analyze existing recordings, if you like. So you could make entries and study their recordings. I don't intend to document them during the contest, though. As for sending info out during the battle, probably not. Although - you are free to do that with the sandbox, of course. It all runs in your browser.

Thanks! If you want to use ClojureScript, maybe just work in an editor of your choice and paste into the site for now. I do that anyway when I play with it, as I prefer Sublime to Ace.

Right now it starts a game 1 minute after the previous one ends. I will likely speed that up as the number of submissions increases.

Nope, I will pay in bitcoins. I fully intend to pay in bitcoins (which I have set aside), regardless of the value, but reserve the right to pay in cash in case something happens to mine AND they become ridiculously expensive. I would pay $500/coin to buy them back in the case you describe. I would not pay $10,000/coin, however, if my 10 were stolen. Just protecting myself and my family from a crazy event.

I would say the programming skills requirement for the game is just beginner level. At least that was my hope making it. If those languages are new to you it will take a little overhead but not much.

No, that's not the case. twait won't block your Node process from handling other events.

I believe this code is painfully unreadable - and that's despite the fact that CoffeeScript is very elegant and easy to read. (It's not you, it's async.) Further, maybe i'm misreading this, but it appears getPersonality and getLastTalked are fired in serial. Can someone who knows CS well fix that and reply? Thanks!

It's funny, when Max started programming Tame.Js a couple weeks ago, I exchanged emails with a developer who tried to make something similar for CoffeeScript who couldn't convince others it was needed. He said the common response was that if you need something like Tame for async you're not "doing it right." (Obviously we disagree.)