More AI challenges through Squirrel .NET... V0.2Alpha released
You can read about some of the changes up on Games4Dotnet:WebServiceGames:Squirrel .NET. I'm hosting three separate releases off of Project Distributor at this time, with the latest being v0.2Alpha. Not too much has changed since the last version, but the complexity and challenge of the puzzle has been upped quite a bit.
Previously the game allowed a single mode, which is now known as NutRace. This meant running around collecting all of the nuts, a version of the travelling salesman problem. The new modes are more of a message sorting problem where the squirrels are required to pick up nuts, but carry them to a storage location once they have reached capacity. To make matters worse, the storage locations also reach capacity. That means you have to choose carefully the order in which the nuts are picked up and then where they are dropped off to achieve the lowest possible numbers.
The command line client supports methods for creating new games on the server. You can pass in parameters such as the size of the grid, the number of nuts on the ground, and the number of trees. The board is posted and everyone is now able to play your board. The back-end process is all automatic with regards to world generation, but I might change that in the future if enough people have interest in the specific design of a layout. You can see the algorithms used for all three modes of the game and the code I'm running is very simple leaving plenty of room for improvement by other developers. In fact, I've left in a challenge.
There is an inherent flaw in the OneNut running code that might be very hard to spot. You'll only notice it because when you play the #11 board with the OneNut mode, the algorithm I've provided does not solve the puzzle. Why not download the source and try to figure that guy out? See if you can post a score for the puzzle #11 on OneNut mode. If you figure out the problem feel free to post it in the comments.