BATTLE
Two machines take turns trying to guess each others next guess.
Each box is equipped with a matrix of 16 A/C light bulbs that are used as a display. Inside each box there is a micro controller that’s able to control each light bulb discretely and communicate with the other box over serial connection. The two microcontrollers are playing a game with each other.
The game is guessing the future state of the other machine. This is attempted by using something like a Markov chain. Both of the machines share a common lexicon of 13 possible patterns. The game consists of the machines taking turns creating and displaying sequences of patterns. Each sequence is 10 patterns long. A turn is composed in three steps.
- Read the incoming sequence, what are the transition probabilities ( what is the distribution of transitions from one pattern to the next divided by the number of patterns in the sequence )?
- Given the transition probabilities and a random starting state taken from the input sequence, construct a new sequence 10 patterns long that is most probable continuation of the input sequence.
- Send the new pattern to the other machine and wait for more input.
When one of the boxes constructs a sequence that is identical to the input sequence, that box has lost the game. At that point it will flash it’s columns from left to right and then construct a completely random sequence to start the game over. The box that won never knows that it won, it continues with the game as if it never ended.
Here’s a video of the two machines in action:
I used the Sanguino microcontroller board for this project because it was cheap, it has lots of i/o pins, and it has two hardware serial ports. I used cat 6 cable and fixtures to connect the serial ports of the two machines together and to upload code from my computer.
I had never built a project that uses two microcontrollers talking to each other so I had to look around for something similar to get an idea of the best way to do it. I found MeggyChip a game written by Chris Brookfield and Windell Oskay for the excellent Meggy Jr game platform. I was able to use the communication protocol from that game with a little modification.
Here’s my awkward attempt at implementing some kind of Markov like process. It mostly works but I had to fudge it a little because for some reason there was a tendency for the machines to converge on the first pattern in the lexicon:
You can download the code for the whole project here:
github.com/taboularasa/battle/