Determining which ants are in which battles takes a bit of work.

A battle can be defined as a collection of ants all of which potentially

interact. It is not required that every ant interact with every ant on the

other team, only that if an ant interacts with an ant on the other team

the two of them are in the same battle. The implication of this is that

you have to consider chains of interaction, e.g., my ant A interacts with

ant B, which is not my ant. But B interacts with my ant C. All three

ants are in a single battle. Of course if C interacts with another ant D

that one is in the same battle also.

By interact I mean the following. Two ants interact if if it possible

for them to move in such a way that they will be within the attack radius

of each other. It's not necessary that they start within the attack radius,

only that there is a way for them to move into range of each other if each

moves in the right (or wrong) way.

I'd like you all to develop code to identify the battle groupings and be

prepared to talk about it next Saturday.  

This will give you a start on your combat code.

An alternative to this assignment is to read and understand Influence Maps and

write code that evaluates all moves on the basis of influence maps and combat

interactions. If you take this approach be prepared to explain why identifying

individual battles as above isn't necessary. In this case be prepared to discuss

your overall move evaluation strategy.

At the start of each turn, my bot is given a list of myAnts and a list of enemyAnts.

However, I see no way to distinguish among enemyAnts in a game that has 3 or more players.

Suppose that I have 2 myAnts and 2 enemyAnts all within attackRadius of one another.  If the 2 enemyAnts belong to the same bot, all 4 ants will die, correct?  However, if the 2 enemyAnts are each from different bots, then each of them is looking at 3 enemies, while myAnts are only looking at 2 enemies - therefore my 2 myAnts will survive and the 2 enemyAnts will die.  Again, is this a correct reading?

So if I have no way to distinguish among the different teams of enemyAnts, how can I possibly evaluate this situation?

The ants are identified by a number that corresponds to the order in which they appear in the play game command. so all the ants for bot 0 (the first bot in the play game command) are identified by the coordinate location followed by 0 and the same goes for all the others.

ex)

a 0 5 0 (bot 0 ant at 0,5 )
a 2 5 1 (bot 1 ant at 1,5 )
a 4 5 2 (bot 2 ant at 2,5 )

it goes by alphabetical order with the first bot being A the second B and so on. so if you want an ant at any specific location you can edit the map location and you a lowercase letter corresponding ant you want. so if you are bot A ie the first bot you would put an "a" at that specific location