[Melbourne-pm] Timer::HiRes and alarms? (Was: AI Contest)

Sam Watkins sam at nipl.net
Thu Nov 11 03:55:51 PST 2010


> Ahh, good point - the signals may be happening in some other scope.

$| depend on scope, it's a global.  'local' allows to temporarily change a
global variable, until the 'local' block exits.  I suppose your 'local' block
hasn't exited yet when the signal handler is called, so it shouldn't make any
difference if you use local or not.

It's going to be hard^Wimpossible to get very high scores in perl unless you
use a perl native code compiler or something.  You just don't have the same
computation capabilities.  Well-written C can be hundreds of times faster, and
there's barely anything that can be done to speed up the perl code.  But good
luck anyway, maybe with a brilliant algorithm can get in the top 100!

You definitely would need to use an algorithm that makes the most of its time,
because the more it thinks the more chance to find the best move, unless the
game is trivial.

I'm not sure how the top bot could be a Lisp bot - perhaps that Lisp hacker is
very very clever!  or perhaps they are using a very neato fast Lisp compiler.

I suppose to win, you'd need to do game analysis like a chess-playing program:
- tree search, mini-max pruning, etc, and throw in some good heuristics!


Sam


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