SnakeComp is an AI competition based on the popular snake game. By implementing the SnakeControl interface (deciding in each turn in which direction a snake moves), participants can submit their snake control and let several snakes compete with each other.

Besides being fun, this project can be used to learn programming with Java or to facilitate small programming competitions.

The project can be built using gradle creating an executable jar file. But you can also start it from the main class (control.Main) directly.

There are already some simple snake controls in the package control.samples. You can take these as a starting point how to implement your own snake control. To integrate your snake control into the competition, you need to implement the control.SnakeControl interface and make your class part of the control.samples package. Please keep all code needed for your snake control (except imports of course) within one file. You can either select a folder in the UI where your snake control file is located or you can specify that folder as a parameter when executing the jar file or the main class.

The UI will show you the maze where the snakes will move and some buttons and sliders to configure the settings of the competition. You can specify the size of the maze, the number of walls, whether the maze should have a border of walls (then it is called an arena), the zoom level, how many pieces of food per snake will be in the maze, how long the snakes are initially, how fast the snakes move, how long snakes survive without eating, and whether snakes re-appear after they die. On clicking the start button, the competition will start. You can either wait until the competition is finished or you can abort the competition by clicking the abort button. Moreover, the UI shows some status information about the snakes (their names, their current length, whether they are alive, and the maximum length they ever reached if snakes re-appear after they die).

In each turn, each snake moves one field into some direction (UP, LEFT, DOWN, or RIGHT). If a snake moves on a field with food, its length increases by one. If a snake moves on a field with a wall or another snake part (possibly from itself), it crashes and dies. Moreover, if a snake does not move on a field with food for too many turns, it dies of hunger.

The snake control needs to decide on a given maze and position of the snake's head in which direction to move next. This decision has to be computed within 200 milliseconds. If a snake control takes too long to compute the next direction, the next direction is always set to UP and the snake dies if its control took too long for three times (not necessarily in a row).

Pull requests are always welcome.

In case you encounter a NullPointerException when trying to load snake controls from a folder, check whether your Java installation is properly configured such that a JDK (not only JRE) version of Java is being executed from any path. If that does not solve your problem, you can just add your snake control to the list in the Main class and start the competition with the argument "samples". Then the list of snake controls specified in the Main class will be used for the competition without loading these files via the dynamic compiler.