I guess the question come back to what our are individual goals. One of my goals was to create a totally autonomous netrek team that could beat the best the INL could muster, but it wasn't the most important one. The most important goal I had was to setup a league and the infrastructure to allow other people to write their own bots and compete with them. We are not the first ones that thought of creating bots for netreks, and other people have made bots before. But then how many of these bots are currently maintained, and did the creation of these bots lead to more people playing netrek or even more people creating bots? I don't want this endeavor to reach a dead-end like most of the previous work. If we create a robotic netrek league, we can push having different classifications of bots and allowing team plus individual entry. Because we would have a league, it wouldn't matter that much if people drop out later on, and by making it more public we might be able to sucker the public in general to participate in our competitions. Who knows, someone could probably sucker their local IEEE, ACM, AAAI, or AUVS to sponser something like that. How many years are we planning on participating in this endeavor? And will we still participate if we beat an INL team, or on the other hand, never even getting close to beating a chaos team? Darryl -----Original Message----- I also intend to have the bot teams run simulations for several hundred hours between themselves before daring to introduce them to the INL. :-) > Also, you then don't have to worry about people using global variables. > Cleaning up the code is going to be a major project and really isn't worth > it. Most of the code is actually quite simple. I plan to have the basic functions complete in only a few hours of work. It won't be today, but we'll see about Wednesday. I will make every attempt to ensure that the results of the effort can be re-used by others. mark -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 3043 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/netrek-dev/attachments/20011210/3f730db2/smime.bin