Slime Cricket Bugs

This is a post to document what I see as the problems that should be overcome in a recoding of Slime Cricket. I know that there is a list of suggestions available on the site, which do not at all document the issues that I believe to be the most pressing and focus mostly on the one player version. Slime Cricket (world cup edition) works best in my opinion as a two player game. For a one player slime game, I suggest Slime Volleyball which is a challenging game with high quality AI. The coding of an AI in slime cricket does not interest me.

The first issue is that occasionally (you won’t see this in every game), the program skips the first ball of an over, recording it as a dot ball, and progressing straight to the second ball of the over.

The second issue is that while playing this at Sydney University, we discovered that it is possible to bowl a ball that the batsman has no chance of hitting. This necessarily appears to involve not jumping, and making contact with the ball when the bowling slime is in its original position. When such a delivery is bowled, my strong suspicion is that the program is still running in pre-delivery mode, thus not enabling the batsman to make contact with the ball. In the case where the batsman leaves his crease during the delivery, this technique can be exploited to create a guaranteed wicket.

It would be great if a modified version of slime cricket became available which addressed these concerns. I have heard one expression of interest in doing the coding. (I think I would be best as a playtester, given my limited coding knowledge). The (java) source is available here.

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Tic-Tac-Toyola

I came across an interesting article in the latest issue of The Zine. Basically it seems to say that if you take naughts and crosses (or any other two-player turn based game), and “payolarise” the game by adding bribery, there still exists an optimal strategy. I haven’t read through the article in detail, I believe at this stage that these conclusions are correct, but some of the arguments appear to have some dubiety.

The article is also noteworthy for the terrible presentation of mathematical formulae in HTML that it contains. Which prompted me to try and find a way to better present such mathematical material. I was fiddling around with a couple of things with no success, and wonder if anyone else knows how best to proceed. Ideally, I’d like to at least be able to retypeset that article.

Some upcoming diplomacy

There is the Boston Massacre here in Boston in a week and the email ANZAC Cup for which a couple of gamestarts are still available, both of which I am involved with. Of course there is the worldwide FtF database of upcoming tournaments, including in particular the Sydney Diplomacy Challenge at the end of September.