AI Game 6 - Recovery · John Westhoff's Blog

I found an unfinished blog post from Halloween of 2017. Given the state of the world, it might be worth revisiting.

Several years ago I had this idea for a game, where people would make virtual robots from snapped together components, and then program the robots in a language of my (poor) design. I’ve actually discussed it a few times on my blog.

I wanted to write a typechecker for the language, or at least something better for error handling, but I didn’t. It looks like three years ago I started to, but I never finished anything substantial. That hasn’t changed.

Instead I am really just throwing this out there once again - with the possibility that yet another FIRST Robotics competition season is cancelled, I think the time is now to come up with some kind of robotics related competition that can be done poorly virtually.

I’ve only added one feature to the language - the ability to modify variables at more local scopes than global. For instance, the set built-in function. set behaves very similarly to def, which defines one or more variables in global scope. set, on the other hand, re-defines variables in the closest scope it can. This means it is now possible to have a closure change one of its captured variables, meaning it is now possible to pretend to have mutable objects through closures. This is pretty cool, and it only took a minute or so of work.

Additionally, I added dot notation for closures, so you can say obj.x to get the value of the variable x captured by closure obj. This was done in a hacky and bad way, but it does work as long as there is only one level of indirection. Finally, I added another def command, ldef, which is like set or def, but it adds a variable to the most local scope. This is useful for closures having their own state that is separate from their creating function.

;;;;A demo for showing closures ;;define a function named obj ;;that returns a closure ;;that pretends to be an object with a getter and setter (def obj (fun '(x) (do (ldef y 2607) (fun '(f a...) (switch f '() "get" x "set" (set x (car a)) )) ))) (def str "") ;define an empty string to store a message (def obj1 (obj 23)) ;construct an obj with x=23 named obj1 (def str (+ str "After constructor, obj1.x is " obj1.x "<br>")) ;add the value to our message (obj1 "set" 14) ;set obj1.x to 14 (def str (+ str "After set, obj1.x is " obj1.x "<br>")) ;add the new value to our message (def str (+ str "obj1.y is " obj1.y)) ;add the value of obj1.y to the message str ;return our nice string

Going forward, I’d like to add more sensors and actuators. I wonder if some kind of fake electrical subsystem is worth adding. The game does use a 2D physics engine, so perhaps a weight limit could be added, and then there could be different motors, giving more mechanically inclined people something to do. A 3D game would probably be better for this stuff, but that’s hard considering the game being in-browser was a major goal of mine (lots of people use Chromebooks or tablets).