Tron Light Cycles

Tron (1982) - "Light Cycle Battle", inspiration for a entire generation of video games.  

I like programming. When I am feeling sharp I like nothing better than horribly complex problems. When I am feeling dull, like I have been for the last couple of weeks, I want simple minded problems. Coding Game has lots of problems. They all start out easy enough but some of them quickly become nasty difficult. Looking for something easy to work on I thought I would try Tron Battle, one of their older multi-player puzzles. I might run out of steam before I master it, but the preliminaries will keep me amused for a couple of hours.

    Imagine my surprise when my quick and dirty solution became a contender. It's not in the top rank but it's not down at the bottom with the dross either. Watching it run a few times against other players I thought of a couple of simple modifications. One required a modification to an existing procedure. The other required simple commenting out (removing) one line. Guess which one gave me a bigger improvement?

Update: I just looked at the result and 'export' scrambled the code, so never mind the rest of this post.

    I just noticed that Blogger has a new feature: Pages, so I've put a copy of my program over there, in case anyone is interested. The program doesn't do any fancy graphics, it's all logic, and simple minded logic at that. It simple heads in the direction with the largest open space.

P.S. Notepad++ used to have an export function that produced html with color coding. Well, the export function only works with the ANSI version and I somehow had ended up with the Unicode version, so I did a reinstall and now export works, but it doesn't do the colors anymore. Bah. Cut and paste might work just as well. And Blogger's 'Pages' are kind of narrow for code.