Google AI Challenge 2010 part 2

They've finally added Common Lisp as a supported language to the Google AI Challenge.  (Just before they stopped adding new languages, phew!)

There were some issues getting my starter pack to work on their server since they're running an older SBCL (1.0.18 on Debian) and that didn't support the "--script" switch.  That combined with them being very busy meant it took a while.  We were passing error messages and solution back and forth only once every other day.

So now the code is on the server side is compiled (#'save-lisp-and-die with :executable t) which means you can make good use of the two extra seconds you get for the first move (which some other languages need for starting up).  Anyway, check the Makefile and example.sh for details.

There's still some issues with the starter pack if you're running locally and you don't want to run "make" for every other change (and ofcourse you don't want that!) so check the "Common Lisp pack?" thread in their forums for discussion and solutions.

Google AI Challenge 2010

For those who've missed it: Google AI Challenge 2010

There's no Common Lisp starter pack (edit: since this is getting misinterpreted I meant a CL starter pack for the AI Challenge) but after a particular nasty adventure spelunking for days through an archaic database at work, fighting through the 20 years of cruft that has been build up inside of it and finally finding and fixing the problem I decided that I needed a break and wrote an initial version of a Common Lisp (SBCL) client.

Perhaps someone with connections at the University of Waterloo and some work can finish it and make it an official starter pack? I've got to go back to work ;-)

Relevant links:

• Common Lisp starter pack
• Forum post

A Black Tie and a Clysma

I've uploaded one-and-a-half project to GitHub that may or may not be useful to other people:

Black Tie packages the noise functions that were previously in Okra as a seperate library. It is not very extensive yet and has only been optimized for SBCL. At the moment it includes functions for generating Perlin noise, simplex noise and Voronoi diagrams.

Clysma is a toy project that at the moment mostly serves as an example of using CL-GTK2. I don't really know where I want to go with it but for now it allows you to stroll through a running CL session and do some sightseeing.