The Google AI Challenge should start any day now and I and "anwyn" have both made Common Lisp starter packages . anwyn's follows the API of the other starter packages more and is perhaps a little more lispier (I like LOOP a lot) and mine's a little more bare-bones: just the basic communication with the game server and a silly example and you have to do the rest.One little extra in my starter package is a "proxy bot". Since the initial starter packages use conventional languages, developing and running the bot is also pretty conventional: a basic edit, compile, run (crash, coredump) loop. The proxy bot takes it on himself to be the one that's started up and shut down every time[1] instead of your real bot, so you can keep the latter running in an, in my case, Emacs + Slime session.(I don't have to tell the advantages of this to this audience.)This proxy bot is perhaps useful to people writing their bots in Clojure and Scheme (and Haskell?) as well. Although they will have to adapt their main loop a little to allow for socket communications besides the normal way of talking to the game server.Also, there's an unofficial server on which you can test your bot against others: http://www.benzedrine.cx/planetwars/ [1] You don't really have a choice with the Planet Wars game engine.

Labels: common-lisp, google-ai-challenge, lisp