The Hunger Game
Hey Robot-Katniss, want to play The Hunger Game?
UPDATE (oops): It turns out LinkedIn doesn't handle GIFs terribly well. If you're interested in seeing all the colour-and-movement, view this article on the Emerging Stack blog.
The Rules
You will be dropped into a foreign-land. Your goal - find apples, eat apples, survive.
Careful though, there are tasty apples (red) and poison apples (green).
With every ‘tick’ of the clock, you must make a decision to move one-of-five ways, always striving to eat the maximum number of good apples and avoid the bad ones.
Eat no apples, and you starve.
You can’t walk through walls.
Over-time, old fruit dies, new fruit grows.
Now that you know the rules, you have 30 minutes to work out FOR YOURSELF how best to survive and thrive.
And sorry, you don’t get any ‘if…then…else’ code to get you started. That stuff’s for old robots.
GO!
Gee…you’re really bad at this. But we said we’d give you some time to learn so we’ll check back later. Good luck and try not to starve.
30 minutes later, and a hot CPU, later
Wow Robot-Katniss - you’re eating tasty apples like a boss!
Have a trophy. And we promise not to refresh you for a few more minutes.
If you’re curious how this works and want to try it for yourself, head on over to the amazing Andrej Karpathy’s website.
From the moment you launch the page, your own little Robot-Katniss will start learning. You can watch her go from stupid to stupendous yourself (it takes about 30 minutes until she’s reasonably well optimised).
Warning - this experiment will chew up all your CPU so don’t plan to use your computer for anything else while you play.
Thanks Andrej for bringing tools like this to life. And thanks to Google Deepmind for teaching computers how to learn, think and act…and not kill all humans.