Probably the most important capability of a successful ant team is the ability to find food. That should be your first priority. Let's devote this week to that objective.

Next Saturday I'd like to run your agents against each other to see which ones are good at finding food. I've set up a .cmd file that illustrates what I want to do. See ... /Dropbox/Antbots/4greedyBots.cmd.

When you execute that file (on your computer) 4 bots will compete with each other. (As written, there are two copies of each of two bots, but that's not necessary.)  The map is a difficult maze map. Try running your bot by substituting it for one of the built-in bots. 

The bots that currently run are two version of a greedy algorithm. One is in Python and one in Java. If food is in the line of sight of a bot, it will go toward it. Otherwise it will move randomly.  Can you do better than that?

How do you know if food is in the line of sight of a bot? For each bot-food combination make a path each step of which minimizes the Manhattan distance between the bot and the food. If that path does not require the use of a Water cell, the food is reachable.