XTBOT(6)XTBOT(6)NAMExtbot - automatic player for xtris
SYNOPSISxtbot [ -help ] [ -n nick ] [ -quiet ] [ -test ] [ server.name [ port ]
]
OPTIONS-help Prints out a summary of the command-line options xtbot recog‐
nizes.
-n Sets the nickname for the bot; the nickname appears at the bot‐
tom of the screen on xtris clients.
-quiet Sets quiet mode: xtbot will not output any diagnostics or error
messages. xtris always starts xtbot with this option.
-test Runs the bot in test mode: xtbot will not connect to a server or
show the game in progress, but will just simulate 16 games as
fast as it can and print stats on the number of lines it did and
the number of bricks it played.
ARGUMENTS
server.name
Specifies the machine on which an xtris server (xtserv) runs.
xtbot will connect to that server, and add itself to the game.
If the server is not specified, xtbot will attempt to connect to
a server on localhost (127.0.0.1). If no server is running on
localhost, xtbot will exit with an error message.
port Specifies the port to connect to, if the server was started on a
port other than the default (19503).
DESCRIPTIONxtbot is a robot (i.e an automatic player) for xtris, a synchronous
multi-user version of Tetris.
xtbot connects to an xtris server, registers itself as a bot, and simu‐
lates a game of Tetris whenever a human player hits 'play'.
The current version of xtbot uses a pretty good decision algorithm,
which usually does several thousand lines before losing, when playing
on its own. When playing against a bot, though, the main limiting fac‐
tor is the speed, whic is why xtbot purposefully waits a little before
dropping each brick, so that humans can compete speed-wise.
xtbot is started automatically by xtris, with the option '-quiet', when
a player presses the 'bot' button.
Running copies of xtbot can be killed either by clicking on their name
from an xtris window, or by killing the process.
It is fairly easy to adapt xtbot to make your own bots based on your
favorite decision algorithms. For this the easiest way is to change
the decision function in decide.c while keeping the rest of the bot's
skeleton (in xtbot.c). See the comments in decide.c, decide.h and
xtbot.h for details about the interface between these. Alternatively,
the protocol between the client and the server is described in detail
in the file PROTOCOL, so you can make completely independent bots.
ENVIRONMENT
The default algorithm for the bot depends on 6 coefficients to evaluate
each possible position of the piece. You can set the environment vari‐
ables XTBOT_FRONTIER, XTBOT_HEIGHT, XTBOT_HOLE, XTBOT_DROP, XTBOT_PIT,
XTBOT_EHOLE. See the file decide.c to see what they do.
The values for the coefficients that xtbot uses now were obtained with
a genetic algorithm using a population of 50 sets of coefficients, cal‐
culating 16 generations in about 20 hours on 20-odd Sparc workstations.
This improved the average number of lines from 10,000 to about 50,000.
The code used for this isn't nearly clean enough to distribute in a
release. If you're interesed, please e-mail the author privately.
SEE ALSOxtris(6), xtserv(6)BUGS
None known; please report any bugs to the author.
AUTHORxtbot was written by Roger Espel Llima <roger.espel.llima@pobox.com>.
Roger Espel Llima Oct 13, 1996 XTBOT(6)
