Scalatron: Rough Approach and Running Code
This weekend, I sat down and got comfy with Scalatron, a programming tutorial based around building a competitive bot in a game environment in Scala.
At first, I was a bit stymied; with no Java-friendly IDE, and the instructions being really IDE targeted, I had some problems getting my development environment set up. Thanks to some help from godwinsgo on Twitter, I got set up with an environment where I was able to have:
– Automatic compiling on file save, which was super helpful (rather than having to do something else)
– The ability to quickly swap back over, tap a button, and have Scalatron reload my bot and test it right away.
After some playing, I wrote a bot that is pretty good: it gets ~22000 in the ‘reference’ (bot on its own, 5000 steps, 100×100 field). I have a better understanding of some of the simple mistakes that I made — adding a println at the end of my function when I have a return type expected will return a somewhat cryptic “Expected Type, Got Unit” error message pointing to a spot in my code that it doesn’t make sense to me; same with really any case where I’m not paying careful attention to return types, since without an explicit ‘return’ statement, what gets returned is confusing to me.
I probably wrote terrible Scala; I didn’t bother to learn much about the language, just enough to actually hack my bot into something that worked. (My bot is on github, if people want to critique my terrible Scala — or code in general.) However, I was able to get working, learned some things about Scala, and wrote a cool digital robot. (Hooray!)
Thanks to David Winslow for giving me the bits to running, and to Scalatron for helping me have a fun project for this weekend!