Go Basicbots

go basic game October 12, 2021

Bill Jones asked for help for his Go game, basicbots. This is, as he describes, basically a port of Tom Poindexter’s original crobots game from 1985.

The premise is simple: programmers write “robots” in a targeted programming language (BASIC, in basicbots’ case) and use primitives to scan for opponents, move, and shoot. Typically network access and secondary storage access are constrained (so your robot can’t be a proxy for a much more powerful algorithm hosted elsewhere).

There’s a lot of strategy involved in building effective robots; do you emphasize efficient algorithms over speed? A direct approach versus an intelligent scan?

This is Mr. Jones’ first open source project, he says, and he’s asking for help in these areas, copied from the README as of 2021 Oct 12:

  • Fixxing spelling errors and typos.
  • Creating documentation.
  • Documenting the code.
  • Squashing bugs.
  • Adding features.
  • Suggesting enhancements.
  • Guiding me to a better understanding of Open Source projects.
in go basic game

Reading time: 1 minute.