Tension rises (week 6 status report)

It's a bit overdue, yeah, but let's see anyway...

So, from last week's status report, the plan was to externalize the rules to show it really is a framework. Well, I did that. And I then noticed my bot was slow, so I worked a bit on that, mainly because testing was not fun. But it still was not good enough. I then rewrote part of the bot to use an external constraint processing system. It's still slow for some forms of rules (not entirely sure why), but until now I managed to evade those.

I then added types to constraints. This allowed me to parse arguments of rules into Python types so I can use ints and tuples as they are meant to be used in the guards and bodies of rules.

On advice (or should I say "slight pressure") of Mithro, I then set out to create a bot that interacts a bit meaningful with the universe. It now manages to build fleets and colonizes planets. It's still not smart and mostly relies on flooding the universe, but that's a matter of writing good rules now, which goes rather fast.

I said slight pressure, because Mithro told me he didn't really like the way my project was going. He's right, of course. I didn't really focus on a deliverable AI because somewhere along the way, the focus had shifted to a framework in my mind. I suppose I failed to discuss that properly. Anyway, I tried hard to show my bot does work, so I hope mithro and nash will give me their confidence for the next half of Summer of Code.

Anyway, next week I'll implement long-term storage and rework the rules a bit to take advantage from it. I'll then finalize the parsing so it's possible to write human-readable rules and I'll then focus on writing a bot that can set up a fight.

I've also discovered a few bugs in various parts of Thousand Parsec, among which a few ones in RFTS. That was part of the goal of the project (to make RFTS more stable), but it's annoying nonetheless.