A5 - Attacking Weaknesses in the Simulator

[Yanqing (Jack) Zhou]

Is it acceptable to exploit inherent weaknesses in the simulator, e.g.
the pseudo-randomness of map generation?

[Lonnie Princehouse]

I'm not sure how this is possible. We'll be using different maps to grade and for the competition.

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Yanqing (Jack) Zhou <univ...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is it acceptable to exploit inherent weaknesses in the simulator, e.g.
the pseudo-randomness of map generation?

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[Jack Zhou]

I see. The reason I am asking is that there is a getRandom() method which returns a Random object, presumably with the seed used to generate the map. Unless that is not true, i.e. you're using pre-generated maps, is it not possible to re-create the map without traversing through it?

[Lonnie Princehouse]

So you're thinking to run the simulator from within the simulator to learn the map? I'm not sure how you would get the original random seed from inside the Naturalist.run() method, but yeah, don't do that. It's clever but it's not the point of the assignment. 

[Jack Zhou]

Okay, that's what I thought. Thanks for the clarification.