Drivers

Each player in Hadronize is controlled by a Driver, which is basically just a function that takes the current game state as an input and outputs a player. I implemented drivers on like day #2, but I don’t think I’ve talked about them in a devlog yet.

• The first driver I made is the dogpile driver. It’s logic is extremely simple: it just selects the player who goes first. It doesn’t even reference the game state at all. If every player is a dogpile driver, this means that everyone just dogpiles onto the first player and ends up stealing basically all of its quarks before it can use them. This is obviously a terrible strategy because it’s not even capable of trying to score, but it was very simple to implement and I use it as a placeholder.
• The second driver I made is the rng driver. It just makes random decisions. However, because I insist on everything being deterministic, it can’t just use Math.random. Instead, it stringifies the game state, converts that string into a 32-bit integer via a djb2 hash, then uses that integer to seed a mulberry32 pseudorandom number generator, then uses the output of the mulberry to make its player selection.
• The newest driver that I just finished developing is the expected value driver. It does actual strategic calculations to determine what the expected value of choosing each player would be based on the information it has available, then selects the player that maximizes that value.

Next Steps

I’ve started building the UI, but I’ve still been procrastinating on actually working on it in earnest. I should probably do that.