Project Hoshimi 2007

(Old, 2007)

This is my submission to Microsoft Imagine Cup: Project Hoshimi 2007.

Competition idea:

To program the AI/Strategy for a group of nano-bots. This strategy is then played in a 3D-simulated environment and you get points for accomplishing certain tasks and mission with that strategy. The simulated environment represent a human tissue, and your nano-robots has to be injected in a certain place in that tissue in order to do all/most of the tasks required. Tasks include visiting a number of points in the tissue, building enzyme needles, and going to enzyme points to collect enzyme and take it to an enzyme needle and fill it.

There are many constrains that makes this a tough competition:

- Your nano-bots has only 5 min from the start of the simulation.
- In Round 2, you don’t get to see the area map before hand, so your path algorithm has to be dynamic.
- If your nano-bots takes too much time processing, the simulation engine will freeze them all and continue running the game until they finish processing and they can move again.
- You have five nano-bot classes, each with its own weakness/advantage points.
- Only one nano-bot is injected in the tissue at the beginning of the simulation, and that nano-bot is the nano-AI, your main bot.
- Only the nano-AI can build other bots and needles. Needles count as bots.
- you cant have more than 40 bot at any time during the simulation.
- All your bots can do only one task at a given time (move, walk, collect enzyme). So your nano-AI cant move and build bots at the same time.
- There are 3 colored tissue areas in the area map. The red area let your bots move at their normal speed, the blue area make them move at half of their speed and the green area make them run at one-forth of their speed. This makes path finding harder than it seems.
- To top it all off, there are another injected nano-bots group, and they have one mission, TO DESTROY YOU! …. needless to say that when they kill your main nano-bot, all the other bots you have freeze and stop moving.

There also other constrains in the game, you can read more about the game by downloading it from the link below.

How did I do?

There were hardly any competition with me from Saudi Arabia. Only one team was there before round 1 and it looks like they didn’t submit their files before the deadline. I advanced easily to round 2 (round 1 is so easy that they want you to pass!). I didn’t have time to fully finish my 2nd round submission, I was working alone and I went through a month in the hospital for a major surgery. The submission has no defense strategy against the attacking nano-bots, so I was hoping on luck to get enough points before they kill my main bot.

Seeing that there is only one team from Saudi Arabia, I advanced to the international round, where they get the top 3 teams from each country, and put them in random 4 team leagues, every top 2 advance and they put them again in random leagues, and so on.
I lost at this stage. At first I though that I didn’t do well, but when the rest of the leagues results were posted, I saw that I could have easily advanced to the next round have I been placed in a different league. Mine was the “Iron group” so to speak. But oh well, this is life.

Project files and download

Here you can find the project files for my strategy (which will produce a .dll file on compilation). You’ll need to change the output folder for dll file if you want to compile it.

Here*Not yet* you will find the entire project hoshimi SDK and files, including my submission dll file. Just run the ProjectHoshimi.exe, choose alamed as a user, click on expert mode, choose “AlamedPH” and a map and click start. The simulation should run and it will show you my plan on the chosen map.

Special Thanks

goes to my best friend, Motaz, for making me enter this competition :)