New Coding Challenges?

[Thoric]

How about a Scrabble word finder. Given a tray of letters, and an arrangement of board words, the challenge would be to find the highest scoring word in the shortest possible time.

[Thoric]

...or more challenging still would be a Crossword solver. Parsing information gleaned from the internet, using the clues as search fields, the challenge would be to find the solution to any given crossword.

(This is presuming it must be possible to perform automated Google searches and the like from within LabVIEW... I've not ever tried to do this.)

[Ben]

Here is part of a reply I sent via e-mail

Now don't go making it so interesting I will regret not being able to compete.

I have not looked at the Rubik cube solver but could the challenge be to optimize it? Having an existing solution that may not be optimized would be a good learning experience and eliminates the domain expertise req.

I have been tossing ideas around but nothing practical at this point.

I was considering using Shane's Nugget on writing a USB driver and adapt it to the USB controlled Nerf Rocket Launcher

 

 and then develop a challenge based on that maybe knocking down target at locations that are specified at competition time. If my wife goes for it I may even give the rocket launcher to the winner. But I am not sure how I would score something like that without having to purchase a lot of DAQ hardware. If anyoen has ideas please share them. The other issue is how would people test their code without buying a rocket launcher themselves?

A more ambitious plan would use laser tanks to battle it out in an arena. But then again maybe the laser tanks is a more resonable plan. The challenge could use a tank simulator (Like Tanks the video game) to devlop and then switch to live mode for the competition. Bot doe sthat idea require a lot of effort!

An idea I have been challenged with for a while is a way to fix the time warp you experienced by missing out on that thread that went stale last year.

If we could develop an on-going challenge that started out like a normal challenge but then leave it open for other people to latter challenge the best solution at a latter date. This would open the games up every time a new version of LV was released. It would also be good for the younguns to be able to say "I beat Christians best entry!".

At this point I think we should stop trying to come up with a resonable idea but rather toss around crazy ideas that are interesting and THEN back-down to make it resonable.

Ben

[Thoric]

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Ben wrote:
A more ambitious plan would use laser tanks to battle it out in an arena. But then again maybe the laser tanks is a more resonable plan. The challenge could use a tank simulator (Like Tanks the video game) to devlop and then switch to live mode for the competition. Bot doe sthat idea require a lot of effort!

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Now THAT sounds interesting!

I think what you hinted at regarding a 'virtual battleground environment' for us to test our codes within could work - for a tank competition or similar. Someone would need to provide the simulator of course, which would be some initial effort. I presume the simulator would display a 3D representation of the virtual environment?

A competition where we can pitch all our codes against one another in a winner-takes-all type fight to the death would be awesome. Strategy could be far more important than code precision or speed, and hence younguns shouldn't feel at any particular disadvantage.

Other (crazy?) variations on the theme:

• Robot football (soccer to my international colleagues )
• 3D Maze solver (stuck in three-dimensional maze, got to find path out in shortest time)
• PacMan/Cat and Mouse chase - longest living mouse is winner concept. (3D?)

I'm sure there's much more we can think of...

Message Edited by Thoric on 02-25-2009 03:05 PM

[Intaris]

I posted the old "Travelling salesman" problem on LAVA as a possibility.  It's a simple idea, easy to visualise but no known easy mathematical "optimal" solution.  Kind of similar to the prime challenge I suppose.

When I was in college, we used to have minesweeper challenges in the lab.  We managed to solve even the large mine fields in around 20 seconds after many many weeks of practise.  How about implementing a minesweeper solver?  Not much in the way of real-world application but something everyoine can relate to and should be fun to see in action.

Shane.

@Ben Rocket launcher probably has a camera which transmits via isochronous mode which isn't supported in VISA.......

[BeCeGa]

If we go along with the Robot Soccer Game, and add OOP to the challenge, here i have a small court, (comments and names are in Spanish). Still there are VIs called AI Team 1 and AI Team 2 so we could make direct games between the Teams, The robots have some parameters as battery that could be included to make the Challenge more interesting. To do this we just need to add a VI to check how much the robot moved and subtract the equivalent amount of battery from the robot.

The current AI is quite Simple it just see who is closest to the Ball and if you are not there then it will go back to its start point.

To allow different games (as the AI will always play the same way) the Robot starting positions are moved Randomly.

The only available data to think the moves will be the info stored in you robots, the position of the other robots, and the position of the ball.

With just replacing this VIs we could find who could win.

Also Style in writing the code could be taken in account.

[Neil.Pate]

My first attempt at a solver.

It is not pretty, and the style changes a bit part way through, but it works (kindof...)

Grab it here.

If I get a chance, and can figure out the 3D picture API properly I will try and integrate it into the nice 3D cube visualisation that has been posted somewhere else here.

Message Edited by nrp on 02-27-2009 12:26 PM

[Ben]

Wow Benjamin!

If this is as cool at it sounds....

I will take a look this week-end.

Neal,

Just don't give away the whole game. Leave some room for improvement.

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 02-27-2009 07:34 AM

[BruceAmmons]

I was sponsoring challenges for a while, but I got pretty busy and demand seemed to drop, so I just never started another one.

I do have one idea for a challenge that I could put together pretty quick.  It would be a Sudoku solver.  I would provide a set of puzzles (about 100), and the winner would solve all the puzzles in the shortest total time.  I already have the puzzle generator and made a solver that can solve the puzzles in about 1 msec/puzzle average (if I remember correctly).  I would need to put together the rules, but I can do that fairly quickly.

I can also unofficially announce that NI is expected to be sponsoring a challenge as well.  The details aren't resolved yet, but it will involve control of a model of an inverted pendulum.  NI is supposed to supply a trial license of their simulation toolkit for the competition.  If all goes well, the winner's solution would be used during NI Week on a real inverted pendulum.  If NI isn't able to do this challenge, I will run it myself at some point.

I don't recommend a challenge where people's submissions have to compete against each other.  That can be much more complex to judge, and time consuming to run all the combinations.  The tic-tac-toe challenge was a little tedious in that regard, especially when they started trying to evaluate all the possible remaining outcomes on each iteration.

Bruce

Message Edited by Bruce Ammons on 03-01-2009 08:44 PM

[Ben]

How about "Developing a 3d Hierarchy" challenge?

THe final solution could be come a usefull tool for LV developers.

Ben