Robots is a very simple programming game that is loosely based on my memories of Robocom. You, as a competitor, develop the software that controls an army of Robots with the goal of dominating the playing field.

Due to my overwhelming laziness, this software probably won't run on windows, and probably has serious bugs related to interprocess communication that result in deadlocks and the death of your firstborn child. Use at your own risk!

Robots (the software) is divided into two major components: the interpreter, and the user interface. They communicate using a simple pipe based protocol.

Running the interpreter is the easy part, it has no external dependencies that I can remember.

The user interface module requires a couple external dependencies, which can be installed using whatever method you prefer. It needs:

• wxpython, and
• pycairo

The interpreter component happens to be mostly RPython, so it translates well with pypy. Download PyPy's source, and run:

$ pypy/pypy/translator/goal/translate.py /path/to/main.py

This should generate a file named main-c, which is a much faster version of the interpreter. If I ever get around to holding a tournament, I'll be using the translated interpreter.

The processor of a Robot is fairly simple. It reads instructions and executes them sequentially. It also supports running multiple threads in parallel at the cost of performance. The processor has three global registers, shared between all threads, while each thread has two local registers.

Robots have a huge memory bank that can be used to store a nearly infinite number of variables. The memory bank is shared between threads.

Physically each Robot is a mobile factory, capable of building more Robots at will. Each robot also comes equipped with a scanner and a close range electron beam programmer. The scanner can detect the team and identifier of any adjacent robots, and the electron beam programmer can transfer instructions into adjacent robots.

Robots are programmed in an assembly like language, with one instruction per line. Any text following an apostrophe will be ignored, and can be used as comments.

The first non-whitespace word on the line is the instruction. Each whitespace separated token after is an argument to the instruction. For example:

set L0 10

This line would store the value 10 in the register L0.

Arguments can refer to:

• Local registers: 'L0' and 'L1';
• Global registers: 'G0', 'G1', and 'G2'; and
• Labels: ':main'.

There are also a couple defined quasi-constants, which begin with a '$':

• $pc: The program counter;
• $up, $right, $down, $left: Directions;
• $success, $failure: Fairly obvious;
• $parent, $child: Used with the fork command;
• $eq, $ne, $lt, $le, $gt, $ge: Respectively ==, <>, <, <=, >, >=;
• $id: The id of the current robot; and
• $team: The team of the current robot

Arguments surrounded by parentheses are relative arguments. For example:

jump 0

would jump to the absolute position 0, while

jump (0)

would jump back to right before the jump command, effectively hanging the robot. Labels can also be used relatively.

See the examples in robots/examples for more information.

A line beginning with a colon followed by any number of non-whitespace characters is a label. Labels can be used as arguments, and will be replaced by their position in the code. A label wrapped in parentheses will be replaced by the offset from the current position to the label. Effectively this lets you write relocatable code.

go direction

Moves the robot in the direction specified.

build direction

Builds a robot in the direction specified. The newly created Robot will be programmed with a single 'jump 0' instruction at position 0.

jump position

Jumps to the specified instruction. Jumping past the end of the program will kill the Robot.

fork

Splits the flow of the process into two independent parts. L0 will be set to $parent in the parent thread, and $child in the child thread. Each new thread consumes more resources and commands will run slower the more threads are active.

exit

Ends the current thread. If the last remaining thread calls exit, L0 is set to $failure and execution continues.

if cmp left right

Runs the next instruction if the comparison returns True, otherwise skip the next instruction. cmp may be any of $eq, $ne, $lt, $le, $gt, or $ge or any argument that evaluates to those values.

set dest src

Copy the value from src into dest

add dest src sub dest src div dest src mul dest src

Perform a math operation between dest and src and store the value in dest.

xfer direction src dest

Transfer a single instruction at src in the local Robot to dest in the remote Robot in the direction direction. Sets L0 to $success or $failure.

scan direction

Scans direction for robots. Sets L0 to $failure if the space is empty, or sets L0 to the team, and L1 to the id of the scanned robot.

save src variable

Save the value src into the memory bank at the location specified by variable. variable is a special argument that may be any normal argument, or a percent sign followed by the variable name, for example '%name'.

load dest variable

Load the value src from the memory bank at the location specified by variable. variable is a special argument that may be any normal argument, or a percent sign followed by the variable name, for example '%name'.