CSC490: Homework 6 and 7

In this homework you'll use the asteroidsfw framework again.

In this homework you will implement a genetic algorithm that will improve the Evade state. The gene design is very simple: a gene is just two chars, the first value signifying the thrust of the ship (forward, reverse, or none), and the second one representing an integer between 0 and 17 signifying the sector in which the AI wants the ship to point. (We define a sector to be 20 degrees, so a full circle has 18 of them.)

The three questions that we'll use to determine the genome are:

• How fast is the ship moving toward the asteroid? (We'll discuss how to get an exact value for this in class.) We'll quantize the value into a manageable range in a scale of 0-9, giving us 10 possible states.
• What direction are the asteroid and the ship moving in? (get the value here and place it in a sector between 0 and 17, giving us 18 states.)
• What is the separation distance? (four states)

The number of distinct evasion scenarios we get is 10*18*4 = 720. If we have a ship that knows how to evade in every one of these, it will be pretty good at evading. Your task is to find a good genome with the 720 genes in it by using a genetic algorithm.